Phoenix tries to rise from the flameshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.1/phoenix-tries-to-rise-from-the-flames
The Sunbelt city is one of the nation's most sweltering urban heat islands. But simple solutions to help cool it are at hand. The parking lot at the corner of First and Polk streets, in the heart of downtown Phoenix, doesn't look unusual until you see it from a nearby high-rise. Instead of the usual black or dingy gray, the pavement reflects a dull green – more like an algae-encrusted desert watering hole for thirsty cattle than a rest stop for commuters' cars.

Most drivers don't give the pavement a second thought. But some of the neighbors do. And so does Sheri Roese, who sold the city on the innovative green asphalt coating. Roese is the founder of Emerald Cool Pavements, whose mission is to cool the world's overheated cities, one parking lot at a time.

"People in the neighborhood didn't want a 90,000-square-foot patch of black asphalt in the middle of downtown, where it's already hot," Roese says. "With this, we're changing the surface from a heat-absorbing surface to a heat-reflecting one. And green is a psychologically cool color, too. You get the feeling of nature, even though it's just a parking lot."

In the furnace heat of a summer day, Roese might seem a utopian: After all, downtown Phoenix is hot no matter what. But studies show that asphalt finished with her green and blue coatings stays about 20 degrees cooler than conventional black lots. Spread that across the thousands of lots that freckle the valley's sprawl, and you could begin to combat a problem largely of the city's own making: the hellish heat that now dominates its summers.

Phoenix is the poster child for what scientists call the "urban heat island" effect, or the strong tendency cities have to retain more heat than their unpaved surroundings. In the Sonoran Desert, it's not just a nuisance: It's an actual killer as well as an economic drain and a contributor to global warming. But Roese and a handful of like-minded technophiles believe that solutions are at hand – and might even turn a profit.

Many cities are warmer than their surroundings because their abundant building materials trap heat. But few have suffered from the problem as much, or documented it as thoroughly, as Phoenix. Set in an expansive valley whose bowl shape traps the sun's heat, the city is naturally hot. As early as 1921, a meteorologist noticed that downtown Phoenix, then a small town, cooled off more slowly after a scorching day than the surrounding desert, which cools quickly after sunset.

"At night, natural materials like desert soils and gravels lose their heat really fast," says Arizona state climatologist Nancy Selover, a professor of geography at Arizona State University. "But if you're standing over an asphalt parking lot or a block wall, you'll feel that heat coming off all night long. The nights aren't long enough in summer to dissipate all that heat."

Phoenicians once dealt with the sun's assault using low-tech means –– building covered porches on houses and commercial buildings, planting shade trees, soaking in irrigation ditches and sleeping outside. But with the widespread adoption of air conditioning after World War II, those simple solutions gave way to an orgy of paving and building.

The result has been misery. Nighttime temperatures here have risen 10 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 40 years. In 2013, Phoenix set a new record when the temperature one night dropped to a low of only 96 degrees – one of 15 nights that year that sweltered above 90.

Most Phoenicians react by blasting the air conditioner. The local utility estimates that a 1-degree rise in summertime temperatures results in a 2 to 3 percent increase in electricity use, adding millions to monthly utility bills. Since more than two-thirds of Arizona's electricity is generated by fossil fuels, that increased usage releases more greenhouse gases.

There's a more immediate human cost, too. Since 2006, Maricopa County has reported an average of about 80 heat-related deaths each summer. Sharon Harlan, an ASU sociologist who is wrapping up a six-year study on the Phoenix heat island's health impacts, notes their uneven distribution.

"There are more heat-related deaths and emergency room visits in the low-income areas where high temperatures are concentrated," she says. "People who live in hotter neighborhoods tend to be minority and lower-income, because they tend to cluster together more in the inner city. There's less vegetation there. And in this environment, that's connected to water, which costs money."

Most of the dead are homeless, or poor residents who can't afford air conditioning. The city operates cooling centers where the needy can get water and experience cooler temperatures during severe heat waves. But those are Band-Aids on a problem that, left untreated, will get worse. A 2012 study estimates that climate change could increase average temperatures in Arizona by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. If development continues unchecked, however, the Phoenix area could warm by up to 7 degrees by then.----

This is not inevitable, however. The simplest means of cooling a city, or neighborhood, is low-tech and obvious: shade. A return to more traditional hot-weather building styles, such as shaded porticos and narrower streets, could help make neighborhoods more comfortable, says Harvey Bryan, an architecture professor at ASU. But current zoning regulations often make that difficult. For example, developers of commercial buildings are typically required to provide open sidewalks instead of shaded walkways.

More widespread tree planting would also help. In 2010, Phoenix completed a master plan that calls for approximately doubling the shade provided by trees by 2030. But planting trees conflicts with water-conservation goals. Before the 1970s, many neighborhoods were cooled by trees growing along open irrigation ditches; when those were replaced by more efficient underground canals, the trees vanished. Today, residents can receive a rebate for replacing thirsty trees and turf with desert vegetation.

"If everybody on the block did that," Bryan says, "it would dramatically change the neighborhood. You'll eventually see a 10-degree difference in temperature. I understand the water-conservation issue. But I think there are ways to compromise."

Bryan says that selective planting of shade trees would be wise. So would the use of innovative cooling technologies for outdoor spaces, such as water-wicking Saltillo tiles and artificial fabric canopies. But for a more widespread impact, he says, Phoenix and other hot cities will have to address their biggest heat sinks: their pavement.

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Heat Island Group have estimated that impermeable surfaces – mainly roofs and pavements – cover about 60 percent of many cities, suggesting a tremendous, unmet cooling potential. Former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu believes that simply lightening surface colors in the world's 100 largest cities would offset the projected growth in global carbon emissions for the next decade.

Sunbelt cities have made some progress in implementing white roofing, which significantly cools commercial buildings and lowers utility bills. But asphalt still tends to be very black – and very hot.

The Arizona Department of Transportation, which oversees a lot of pavement, has helped ameliorate Phoenix's heat island almost by accident. It's paved highways with permeable asphalt studded with crumb rubber from recycled tires. The primary goal is to reduce noise levels, but the side effect is cooler pavement. According to Kamil Kaloush, an engineer at ASU, rubberized asphalt retains less heat, and because it transmits less heat to the underlying concrete base, overall road maintenance costs are lower.

Even cooler, though, is pavement coated with reflective sealants like those in the parking lot at First and Polk. When city officials proposed a temporary square-block parking lot there in 2010, neighbors objected, claiming that a swath of black asphalt would roast an already hot neighborhood.

Enter Roese, who has developed sealant in a variety of cool tones – turquoise, teal, beige – that reflect the sun's heat, and persuaded the city to finish the parking lot with it. At $1 a square foot, the sealant is expensive and has been used on only a couple of local sites. But Roese sees potential in the metropolitan area's many big-box stores. Last summer, she monitored parking lot temperatures at a Walmart near Phoenix. Covering a 200,000-square-foot lot with a reflective surface would pay for itself within two to three years, she claims, thanks to savings in air conditioning.

"Chain stores are really where this belongs," she says, "because they are so large. Whoever that first store is that adopts this will change the world. Think of the economic benefits, and not just in cooling costs. Right now, a lot of people in Phoenix say, 'I don't go shopping here in the summer. I'm going to stay home and shop online.' "

So far, though, those who control the most asphalt haven't agreed to pay the tab, and the mixed solutions to the heat issue haven't coalesced into a single broad strategy – even though almost everyone agrees on the magnitude of the problem. More affluent neighborhoods, including ASU's campus in Tempe, boast shade trees, water features and permeable pavements, while poorer neighborhoods swelter.

But a more cohesive regional strategy is emerging. Mick Dalrymple, a green building expert at ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, is drafting a project aimed at reducing Phoenix' average summer temperatures by 1 degree over the next five years. The plan will call for zoning changes, retrofitting of existing buildings and roads, and energy-efficiency initiatives. It's ambitious, but – compared to the steps that need to be taken to address the much bigger issue of planetary warming – it's easy.

"If we were to succeed in lowering Phoenix's temperature by just 1 degree in five years," Dalrymple says, "think what a message that would send about what we can do about climate change."

Peter Friederici is an associate professor of journalism at Northern Arizona University who writes frequently about science and the environment. He has authored several nonfiction books, and curated What Has Passed and What Remains: Oral Histories of Northern Arizona's Changing Landscapes.

]]>No publisherGrowth & Sustainability2014/01/22 02:10:00 GMT-6ArticleWill Navajos approve a Grand Canyon megadevelopment?http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.21/will-navajos-approve-a-grand-canyon-megadevelopment
An audacious development proposal near Grand Canyon National Park divides a tribe and its neighbors. GAP, Arizona -- For over 50 years, residents of this western sliver of the Navajo Nation have watched tourist traffic zoom by on Highway 89, headed for the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell and southern Utah's national parks. Except for a single gas station and a few ramshackle jewelry stands, there's little here to attract vacationers' dollars. And so, few locals objected in July when the Navajo-Hopi Observer began running full-page ads that blared: "It's time that the Navajo People enjoy a fair share of Grand Canyon Tourism!"

But they weren't prepared for the scale of those tourism plans -- a mega-development with hotels, stores and even a tram. The ambitious proposal raises questions about who has the authority to make land-use decisions here, where an impoverished Indian nation borders federal land that most Americans believe should remain protected forever. It also threatens relations with the neighboring Hopi Tribe and Grand Canyon National Park, highlighting divisions between tribal, local and national decision-making as well as competing visions of the best way forward for a community stuck in neutral.

"We know that we can make money without destroying the place," says Navajo rancher Franklin Martin. "But we have to learn to do things ourselves. I think we'd be gullible to take this offer."

Geographers use the term "Marble Canyon" to identify the western edge of the Navajo Nation -- 61 Colorado River miles above the river's confluence with a major tributary, the Little Colorado River. Navajo people, also known as Diné, have lived here for generations, but until 2009, this tract was embroiled in a land-use dispute with the Hopi that in 1966 caused the federal government to halt almost all development on some 1.5 million acres between the Hopi Reservation and Marble Canyon.

The effects of the Bennett Freeze -- named for the then-commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- were profound. Businesses couldn't start; new homes couldn't be built or existing ones renovated; modern infrastructure couldn't be installed. Only 3 percent of the estimated 8,000 Navajo in the area had electricity, only 10 percent running water. The Bureau of Indian Affairs deemed about three-quarters of the housing uninhabitable. When a federally mediated agreement finally ended the freeze a few years ago, the future suddenly looked brighter.

Yet the site and scale of the proposal outlined in the Observer ads astonished almost everyone. From a complex of hotels, restaurants, shops and other facilities on the canyon rim, Grand Canyon Escalade visitors could ride a gondola down into Marble Canyon to a restaurant and a riverside walkway with a view of the rivers' confluence. An amphitheater and Navajo cultural center are also planned. Supporters say the development could bring in $90 million a year.

The proposal, spearheaded by Scottsdale developer Lamar Whitmer and former Navajo Nation President Albert Hale, immediately divided the community. The local Bodaway/Gap chapter passed two resolutions opposing it, citing the spiritual importance of the confluence site, as well as disregard for local decision-making and doubts about the project's long-term viability. Tribal President Ben Shelley gave the developers, Confluence Partners LLC, until the end of the year to demonstrate greater community support.

That came on Oct. 3 -- sort of. During a contentious meeting called by chapter officials on short notice, attendees voted 59 to 52 to support the proposal. Both sides claimed vote fraud, but development proponents declared victory.

"A difference of seven votes is not a mandate," disagrees Deon Ben, a Navajo who is the Grand Canyon Trust's liaison to the project's local opponents. "That just indicates that there is a real split in the community."

"There's the potential for 2,000 full-time jobs," counters Michele Crank, a Navajo tourism and public-relations consultant who is one of the Confluence Partners. "It is my responsibility as a Navajo person to make sure my people are taken care of. Those views of the canyon will still be there. It's just the Navajo Nation will capture some of the revenues as the North and South Rim (of the Grand Canyon) already do."

Despite the October vote, the proposal still has hurdles to overcome, as it navigates several levels of bureaucratic review within the tribe. Local opponents, meanwhile, have created a grassroots group -- Save the Confluence -- which has allied with the Trust, a regional environmental group, to fight the project.

Chapter member Leonard Sloan, whose family raises livestock on the scrubby plateau above the confluence, sees the development as a desecration. "To make a better living, there are things that you can't sacrifice, and this is one of them," he says. "It's like your parents' jewelry or your parents' blankets. This is not something you can sell, because of the traditional values we have as Diné."

Even if it gains the necessary Navajo support, the Escalade still faces an even bigger question: What will the neighbors think? The important neighbors, in this case, are the National Park Service and the Hopi Tribe, which may hold enough legal influence to stop the project.

The boundary between the Navajo Nation and Grand Canyon National Park has always been less than crystal-clear. Many Navajos maintain that the Nation's western border is inside Marble Canyon at the old high-water mark of the Colorado River, as delineated by the 1934 Navajo Boundary Act. But Park Service officials point to a 1969 solicitor general's opinion, supporting an expansion of the park, that the boundary actually lies a quarter-mile from the river. That would mean that the proposed tramway, restaurant and riverside walk would be inside the park, and the Park Service would have the power to stop at least that part of the development. In an October phone interview, Park Superintendent David Uberuaga seemed surprised that the developers had yet to make any formal approach to the Park Service.

"There's no need to," Crank says. "Our development project has no effect on the national park. They run their business, we run our business."

The Park Service has so far soft-pedaled its response; officials say that the decision-making process first needs to run its course at the chapter and tribal levels. If the project moves forward, though, it's likely that the location of the park boundary will have to be decided in federal court.

The Hopi Tribe has made its own feelings clear. In October, the tribal council passed a resolution opposing the project. Tribal members say it would despoil a sacred place: Oral tradition holds that the Hopi people emerged from a mineral dome, the Sipapu, near the confluence. Some Hopi believe that the spirits of their dead reside at the confluence itself, and a pilgrimage to nearby salt mines remains an important spiritual practice.

"The tramway would be descending right into one of the most sacred areas that we believe in," says Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. He notes that Navajo officials have been prominent critics of a controversial plan to create snow with reclaimed wastewater at the Arizona Snowbowl ski area in the Coconino National Forest, in a mountain range regarded as sacred by Navajos, Hopis and members of other tribes -- and that Escalade developer Whitmer has business ties to the family that owns the Snowbowl.

"When you simply say, 'It's our jurisdiction' and shrug off the Hopi, that's a lame argument," he says. "It's an affront to the Hopi people and government that they've chosen to ignore Hopi interests in the canyon. We will do everything we can to oppose this development."

That will likely require more than just passing resolutions. The agreement that ended the Bennett Freeze clearly designates the Bodaway/Gap area as part of the Navajo Nation, but according to federal law also "guarantees access to protected religious sites of both tribes." The Escalade developers say tribal members -- both Navajo and Hopi -- would continue to have such access. Conservationists, however, believe that the agreement may grant the Hopi veto power over development in such a sensitive area. The issue will probably end up in court.

"We don't know what kind of power that agreement has, but we know the Hopis will have a big say in this," says Deon Ben. After decades during which the Bennett Freeze stalled virtually all development, Ben believes that decision-making needs to be done more carefully, with a stronger local focus.

That dovetails with the beliefs of Franklin Martin, who sees potential in small-scale, locally developed tourism, like the Navajo-run tourist enterprises at Antelope Canyon, an hour away, where visitors typically pay $35 to $80 for scenic tours on tribal land.

"Here we have people coming in from all over the world to see how we live and how we do things," he says. "Most of the visitors out here would probably want to see how Native Americans live, maybe spend the night the way the Navajos used to spend the night in a hogan, or see daily events like butchering a sheep. But building a luxury resort -- that's for really rich people. I'd rather be put back in the Bennett Freeze again than have it built."

]]>No publisherCommunities2012/12/10 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleCalifornia prepares for the next burnhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.10/california-prepares-for-the-next-burn
Public officials – and even homeowners – are beginning to accept the inevitability of wildfires in the Golden State. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

When Steve Quarles drives the narrow roads that wind through the steep wooded hills above Oakland and Berkeley, he doesn't get distracted by the million-dollar views of San Francisco Bay. He's too busy looking at the landscape's finer points. Take the roof of that elegant Mediterranean-style palazzo.

"Here's a not-so-good example," says Quarles, a soft-spoken building-materials specialist who works for the University of California's Extension Service. "That clay barrel-tile roof doesn't have any bird stops."

A small cement plug under a half-round roof tile might seem like an architectural trifle, but to Quarles its absence represents a fire danger -- and, since this is an area that has burned several times, it's important. If starlings or house sparrows can get under tiles, they'll build nests there. And when a wildfire comes -- like the devastating Tunnel Fire, which roared through here in 1991 -- strong winds can blow embers into those nests, starting spot fires that can consume an entire house, even a neighborhood.

But as Quarles drives, he sees good news, too: stucco siding; roof tiles made of a cement-like material; vents screened to keep out embers; windows made of double-pane, tempered glass. All these features are mandated under California's tough new building code. Collectively, they're likely to result in fewer losses the next time fire sweeps through.

These home-construction details show that the Golden State is finally coming to accept fire as a fact of life. Instead of hoping that all wildfires will be put out, fire officials, community leaders and even homeowners are coming to embrace the old wildland firefighters' maxim: "It's not if, but when." Increasing numbers of Californians realize that it's not necessarily air tankers and hotshot crews that will save them when fire comes; it's their own actions.

"You personally need to take more ownership of preparing for disaster," says Quarles. Although there's still some resistance from homeowners, "the message is slowly getting out."

The Tunnel Fire claimed 25 lives, destroyed thousands of houses, and caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damages. But it also inspired the long, slow push for a better statewide building code, which was instituted across fire-prone parts of the state last year. And it paved the way for a new and sometimes controversial state program to accurately map areas most at risk from such fires.

Much of California was mapped for wildland fire hazard beginning in the 1980s, but improved technologies have recently enabled experts from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, to do a much better job. Using a computer model developed over the last few years, they can integrate the variables that affect how fire spreads in wildlands -- landscape features such as slope and vegetation -- with data about development patterns and how houses tend to burn.

"Fires don't spread the same way in urbanized areas," says David Sapsis, Cal Fire's chief fire modeler. "This model does a significantly better job of highlighting hazards to areas with structures." In particular, it addresses a well-known fact about wildland-urban interface fires: Most houses don't burn down because they're engulfed by a wall of flames. Rather, they burn because windborne embers cause spot fires that, in the absence of firefighting, spread rapidly.

"Embers get into attics through unscreened vents or into the crawl space, or they get into a woodpile stacked against the house or into a pile of leaves under the deck," says Max Moritz, a fire ecologist at the University of California at Berkeley who helped Sapsis develop the new model.

The model's architects responded by designating "Very High Hazard Zones" around fire-prone wildlands. Drawn in an alarming scarlet, these buffer areas represent the average distance embers can travel from a wildfire. Depending on their municipality's rules, homeowners in Very High zones may have to conform to stricter building codes and seller-disclosure requirements than their neighbors in High or Moderate fire-hazard areas.

Last spring, Cal Fire asked the state's municipalities to provide feedback to the draft maps posted on its Web site. Some local officials pointed out places where the fire hazard had been reduced -- where woodlands had given way to baseball fields or subdivisions, or where groves of highly flammable eucalyptus had been removed. Others simply wanted the VH designations removed because they didn't want any red zones in their towns. And some fire chiefs wanted more local areas designated as VH zones, in order to call attention to what they see as severe fire danger.

Once a map is finally agreed on, it won't take effect until it's officially adopted by local ordinance, along with the accompanying building codes and disclosure requirements. But it also needs to be embraced by the local community as an awareness-raising tool. That's happened in most of California, but it has not been an easy sell everywhere.

----

Town officials in Portola Valley, a leafy and affluent enclave on the edge of Silicon Valley, have refused to accept the Cal Fire map. They're worried about the potential financial implications of the "redlining."

"A lot of the community members feel (a VH designation) would be used against them to raise rates or cancel insurance," says Richard Crevelt, president of the Highlands Homeowners Association, which represents residents of a red-zoned neighborhood. There's no evidence that this has happened, Crevelt says, but that doesn't stop the speculation.

For his part, Sapsis says it would be a "gross misuse" of the mapping process for an insurer to deny coverage or increase premiums based on a Cal Fire map. The maps don't reflect on-the-ground variables, such as the type of construction materials used or how well the brush has been thinned. But Pete Moraga of the Insurance Information Network of California, an industry group, acknowledges the possibility that some insurers will consider Cal Fire's maps as they decide how, or whether, to underwrite a particular piece of property. "Those people who aren't in the high fire areas shouldn't be subsidizing those in the high-risk areas," he says. "If you choose to live in a higher-risk area, you should be prepared to pay higher rates."

Homeowners resent another legal implication of VH listing. Under California law, owners selling property in VH areas are required to disclose that designation to buyers. Residents worry that their sale prices might decline as a result -- especially if similar neighborhoods nearby have a fire hazard that's only listed as High.

One 2006 study examined the effects of the disclosure requirement, which has been on the books since 1998. Surprisingly, it found that average prices for homes in VH areas were in fact 3 percent higher than prices for comparable homes outside those areas. If the high-hazard homes were within a few miles of a recent fire, though, their prices were on average 5 percent lower.

Admittedly, that study was completed before last year's real estate meltdown, and before the recent high-profile California fires that have scorched neighborhoods from Lake Tahoe to Santa Barbara. But it does suggest that the benefits of living in highly hazardous areas, such as sweeping views, proximity to undeveloped areas, or thick surrounding vegetation, often outweigh the hazards -- until a fire strikes. "Many of these places are beautiful," says Moraga, "but it's a cruel beauty."

Cal Fire lacks the legal power to force municipalities to approve its maps, and it's likely that Portola Valley will refuse to do so. But in May, the town council revised its building code standards to be even tougher than the new statewide ones. The new code will affect the whole town, not just the neighborhood Cal Fire considers a VH zone.

Town planner Leslie Lambert thinks that's fair, and she hopes it will also persuade residents to deal with fire-susceptible yards. "Some properties are pretty overgrown," she says. "Everybody's pretty conscious about fire, but it really is time we do more."

Perhaps the ultimate sign of the changing attitude toward wildfire is the increasing popularity of the "stay and defend" philosophy -- the idea that well-prepared residents ought to defend their own roofs, decks and lawns in a wildfire.

It's a philosophy that has gained wide currency in Australia, although it came under serious criticism after conflagrations killed more than 200 people there last February. The idea, essentially, is that residents of fire-prone neighborhoods need not get in firefighters' way. Rather, they can be trained in basic firefighting, provided with hoses, radios and fire-resistant clothing, and prepared for the intense psychological commitment of staying home while the trees in the yard burst into flame.

The full name of the Australian policy is "Prepare, stay and defend, or leave early," notes Moritz, and he emphasizes the "prepare" part. The key, he says, is making a property as fire-safe as possible, and then deciding early whether to stay or go.

The idea hasn't caught on here, at least not officially. In February, fire chiefs in San Diego County held a press conference to denounce it. They fear, with justification, that fire-threatened residents will stay home, then panic at the last minute and try to flee. That's how most of the Tunnel Fire victims died.

But the fire chiefs may be behind the curve on this. The example of Richard Martin is a case in point. A retired professor, he built a fireproof bunker at his house in Santa Barbara's Mission Canyon. He cleared vegetation and installed sprinklers on the roof. When fire raced through the canyon this May, he and his wife ignored police orders to leave. They hunkered down, emerging occasionally to hose down hot spots. And their house survived. Dozens of others nearby did not. When the neighbors rebuild, they're likely to take note.

"People are trying this already," notes Moritz. "The authorities hate it, but they need to know that some people are going to try this."

This article was supported by a Western Enterprise Reporting Fellowship from Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West.

Peter Friederici teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityCalifornia2009/06/05 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA good idea – if you can get away with ithttp://www.hcn.org/issues/40.18/a-good-idea-2013-if-you-can-get-away-with-it
Rainwater harvesting is against the law in many Western states, but folks in Utah, Colorado and Washington want to change that.All Mark Miller wanted to do was wash some cars and water the grass in front of his new car dealership.

As the proprietor of Utah's first LEED-certified, environmentally friendly car dealership, Miller wanted to minimize his reliance on water from Salt Lake City's public utility. So his extensive remodel of the building included two large new cisterns designed to capture rainwater for irrigation and car washing. But Miller was surprised to learn that trapping water on his own roof would be illegal.

"The state said no," he explains. "In order to use the system, we had to have an existing water share. It's ludicrous."

Miller is not the only water-conscious Westerner to run afoul of the region's prior-appropriation doctrine. Conservation advocates, including many utilities, have embraced the idea of using water collected from roofs, and stored in cisterns or rain barrels, to reduce reliance on dwindling surface water or groundwater supplies. Yet in Utah, Colorado and Washington, it's illegal to do so unless you go through the difficult -- and often impossible -- process of gaining a state water right. That's because virtually all flowing water in most Western states is already dedicated to someone's use, and state water officials figure that trapping rainwater amounts to impeding that legal right.

No one actively enforces these laws, as Boyd Clayton of the Utah Division of Water Rights notes: "We're not like cops out looking for speeders. Spending time enforcing these cases is not a priority."

As a result, would-be water harvesters often learn about potential legal trouble only when they try to do the right thing, as Miller did, by asking for a state permit. That's what happened to Kris Holstrom, who runs an organic farm outside Telluride, Colo. The well she's relied on for years provides less water than it once did -- a change she attributes to drought and increased development. So she asked the Colorado Division of Water Resources for a permit to collect runoff from building roofs -- and was denied.

"They felt that the water belonged to someone else once it hit my roof," she says. "They claimed that the water was tributary to the San Miguel River" -- which runs some three miles from her place and is fully allocated to other users downstream.

How much of the precipitation that falls on Holstrom's farm eventually reaches the river? Likely not much. A recent hydrological study found that little precipitation that falls on undeveloped areas in Colorado's Douglas County actually reaches streams. In a wet year, 15 percent of the precipitation does; in a dry year, none. Most observers agree that water collection by a few scattered rural residents is not going to affect overall supplies. Intensive collection by many urban residents, on the other hand, really might affect a region's water budget -- though advocates argue that widespread adoption of the practice can reduce reliance both on other water supplies and on costly stormwater management and wastewater treatment. Many municipalities embrace the practice; Austin, Texas, has subsidized residential rainwater-collection systems for years.

Elsewhere, the practice thrives underground. In July, a store in Durango, Colo., hosted about 30 people at a presentation about water harvesting.

"All these folks were either collecting or interested in getting started," says Laurie Dickson, owner of the Eco Home Center. "Some live in town; some live out on the mesa where they have to haul water, and they don't want to do that anymore."

Dickson readily acknowledges that she regularly sells such water-harvesting supplies as rain barrels and filters. "It's not illegal to sell the parts. It's kind of like 'don't ask, don't tell.' "

State legislators in Colorado, Utah and Washington are working on new laws that would allow small-scale collection of runoff without a specific water right. But given the numerous interest groups with a stake in water law, it's no easy task. Legislators in Washington and Colorado have had a hard time crafting rules dealing with the issue, though some expect that water harvesting -- by rural residents, at least -- in Colorado will be legalized next year. In hopes that it will be, Kris Holstrom is planning to install a 5,000-gallon cistern.

Cities have stepped in, too. Seattle now has a master water permit that allows residents of most neighborhoods to collect some rainwater. A similar solution is in the works for Mark Miller, who has worked out a deal whereby he will be covered for free under the city utility's water rights. City officials view that as a good deal for them, too.

The advantage to the city is that we can then take some demand off our system," says Jeff Niermeyer, the city's public utilities director. "That means we won't have to develop other (water) sources as soon."

This article was made possible with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation.

]]>No publisherWater2008/10/08 13:43:50 GMT-6ArticleMaking an effluent markethttp://www.hcn.org/issues/354/17235
How will Westerners pay for – and market –
their recycled drinking water?A sprawling town whose population has grown by more
than 50 percent since 2000, Prescott Valley, Ariz., is thirsty and
lacks a reliable surface water supply. In most of Arizona, such a
combination is no barrier to growth. But Prescott Valley lies in
one of Arizona's five designated Active Management Areas, where the
state seeks to prevent declines in groundwater levels by requiring
that well-water use be balanced by recharge into aquifers. Though a
great deal of new construction was permitted in and around Prescott
Valley before that regulation went into effect in 1999, developers
seeking new building permits now have to prove that they can obtain
water supplies from sources other than conventional wells.

Among Prescott Valley's arid brown hills, there's no
source more tempting than the roughly 2,500 acre-feet of water
discharged by the town's sewage treatment plant each year. Most of
that water now is poured into the usually dry bed of the Agua Fria
River, where it helps to recharge underground supplies. For every
acre-foot that soaks into the ground, the Arizona Department of
Water Resources allows Prescott Valley to pump an acre-foot of
groundwater from its wells. Legally, the state treats the
groundwater as the same stuff that's pumped out of the treatment
plant, even though it's physically not the same water. A
hydrological study has estimated it will take 20 years for the
recharged effluent to travel underground to the nearest groundwater
well.

Like many other towns and cities in the West,
Prescott Valley uses some of its treated wastewater for non-potable
purposes: irrigating a golf course, filling a couple of small
lakes. But the municipality is exploring a brave new frontier in
Western water sales by preparing to hold an auction, scheduled for
late October, at which it will sell rights to its future supply of
treated effluent - which the state estimates will be 2,724
acre-feet a year. The town could continue to sell small quantities
of effluent credits to single buyers, but, like a farmer who sees
more current value in his land as a chunk of real estate than as
producing fields, it's looking to cash out in hopes of a single big
payoff. It will continue to produce and treat wastewater, but how
the credits that water represents are sold will be up to private
developers or investors.

Prescott Valley officials say
they're doing this in part because they sincerely believe in free
markets for water. "We're trying to break the cycle of subsidized
water resources," says John Munderloh, the town's water resources
manager. "Rather than subsidize the right to water, we believe one
of the best ways to manage it is to let the market manage it. It's
a great incentive to conservation. For the first time in Arizona
history, we're trying to let the market determine the value for the
water."

Whoever buys the water will, in one sense, only
be purchasing paper; Prescott Valley's treated wastewater will
continue to pour onto the sands of the Agua Fria, just as it does
now. But each acre-foot bought will translate into the right to
pump an acre-foot of groundwater elsewhere in the town. In Prescott
Valley's booming housing market, that will translate pretty
directly into a permit to build.

Yet defining how much
all those future water credits are worth now is tricky, since it
depends on speculating about how much new construction will take
place in town not just in the next few years, but in coming
decades. Prescott Valley originally scheduled the wastewater
auction for the fall of 2006, but postponed it when it looked as
though bids wouldn't rise high enough because new construction in
the town had slowed. WestWater Research, a water-marketing
consultancy that's running the auction for the town, has since been
negotiating with a private investment group that has placed a
"price floor" bid for the entire allotment of effluent. That deal
has allowed the auctioneers to set a minimum auction bid price of
more than $61 million.

"This is an unprecedented auction
of both size and type," says WestWater's executive director, Clay
Landry, who describes himself as "a rah-rah guy" when it comes to
water markets.

Even if Prescott Valley realizes no more
than the minimum bid price, a developer would be paying more than
$22,500 for the right to pump an acre-foot of groundwater annually
for the next 100 years. That's a fortune, when you consider that
municipalities in the Phoenix area have recently negotiated deals
with nearby Native American communities to buy the use of tribal
water for the next century for $1,500 to $1,800 per acre-foot. An
acre-foot, or 325,851 gallons, is generally considered to be about
the amount a typical American family of four uses annually, so the
Phoenix price works out to only $15 to $18 for a family's water for
a year - a figure that shows just how cheap, and how subsidized,
water is in much of the West.

Prescott Valley doesn't
have access to the Central Arizona Project canals that convey huge
quantities of Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. If water in
Prescott Valley ends up costing at least 12 times more than what it
costs in Phoenix, that may be an accurate reflection of the true
worth of water in the area - and the higher price may, as Landry
suggests, help promote far wiser use.

"When water gets to
$22,500 per acre-foot," he says, "lots of conservation features
become affordable for new developers."

Beyond free-market
ideology, though, Prescott Valley needs the money - now. It's
cashing out not just because of an abstract belief in water
markets, but because it needs to supply water to all the new
developments that have already been permitted. Town officials plan
to do that by means of a water pipeline that will carry groundwater
30 miles from the Big Chino Aquifer - a defiantly old-school means
of Western water supply that will cost the town at least $78
million.

"We could go out and sell bonds to pay for the
pipeline," says Munderloh, "but that would keep us from doing many
of the other infrastructure-related things in town, such as
building roads."

]]>No publisherWaterArticleTake back these drugs – pleasehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/354/17234
Some communities are trying to keep discarded
pharmaceuticals out of the water supply by organizing
“take-back programs” for leftover drugsAmericans love their medications. Pharmacists fill
more than 3 billion prescriptions a year in the United States, and
consumers also buy huge quantities of over-the-counter drugs. Many
of those pharmaceuticals enter wastewater when people urinate.
Others end up there when unused medications are flushed into
toilets to dispose of them - a practice that pharmacists
recommended for years because it prevents drugs from falling into
the wrong hands or confusing elderly patients. Even sending drugs
to landfills tends to have much the same result, as buried
substances leach into groundwater.

Now, as evidence of
the persistence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the
environment grows, a number of communities are establishing
so-called "take-back programs" to keep unused pharmaceuticals from
entering their wastewater systems. It's no easy task, since many
prescription drugs are classified as controlled substances that can
only be handled by licensed personnel, such as law enforcement
officials.

"The regulations that we've put into place in
this country, for good reasons, are now making it really difficult
for people to do the right thing," says Brenda Bateman of the
Tualatin Valley Water District in Oregon, who has been conducting a
study of take-back programs. "We've really set up a barrier about
who you can hand unneeded pharmaceuticals to."

Oregon
officials are currently working on a program to collect surplus
medications at nursing homes, and many communities around the
country have set up periodic events at which members of the public
can safely discard drugs they no longer need. But California's San
Mateo County has pioneered a permanent drop-off program. Officials
there have set up converted mailboxes or book-drop boxes inside
about a dozen police stations. Only officers can remove medications
dropped in them; then the drugs are transferred to a company that
collects and incinerates medical wastes. In its first year of
operation, the program has collected about a ton of pharmaceuticals
at a disposal cost of about $1.60 a pound.

"A buck sixty
to get rid of a pound of hazardous waste," says Bill Chiang, a
legislative aide to County Supervisor Adrienne Tissier, who
spearheaded the program. "That's pretty good."

]]>No publisherWaterArticleFacing the Yuck Factorhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/354/17227
As population growth and climate change stress the
region’s water supplies, Westerners think hard about
recycling their effluent, although some worry about the possibly
harmful endocrine disrupters found in cleaned-up
effluent.Sometime this fall, Mike Nivison plans to take a healthy swig of
water that exemplifies everything you'd expect from a small resort
town set high in a Western mountain range. The water will be cool,
clear, refreshing. But it won't be pristine spring water pouring
from some mossy crevice.

Nivison is Cloudcroft's village
administrator, and what he anticipates savoring will come from the
village's drinking-water treatment plant - and, not too long before
that, from its sewage treatment facility.

Cloudcroft's
will be one of the first wastewater systems in the nation to allow
- or require, depending on your perspective - residents to drink
treated wastewater that hasn't been naturally cleansed in a river
or aquifer. It will be built entirely as a matter of necessity. At
an elevation of more than 8,500 feet in southern New Mexico's
Sacramento Mountains, Cloudcroft is high and, thanks to recent
years of drought, dry.

"A city like San Diego can go buy
more water," says Bruce Thomson, a University of New Mexico civil
engineer who has been helping Cloudcroft develop its new water
system. "It's expensive, but they can. But Cloudcroft is simply out
of water. Because they're at the top of the mountain, there's no
new place to drill wells. They're at the top of the watershed. They
don't have any other alternatives."

Cloudcroft has only
about 750 residents, but its population swells to a few thousand on
summer weekends. All those people escaping the lowland heat - and
drinking, showering, and flushing - can use more than a third of a
million gallons of water on a single hot Saturday. But the
village's major wells produce only about 150,000 gallons a day. To
make up the shortfall, village officials have resorted in recent
years to hauling water, which is expensive, inconvenient and
energy-intensive.

Nivison figured that Cloudcroft's only
sure source of what he calls "wet water" - that is, usable liquid,
rather than theoretical legal rights or hard-to-reach water that
might be buried somewhere deep underground - was right at his feet,
in the stream of effluent pouring from the village's wastewater
treatment plant. With several million dollars in state funding and
the help of engineers from two universities and a private firm, the
village has been building a plant to purify that water. After
conventional treatments that settle solids and utilize microbes to
degrade or remove pathogens, the plant will use multiple filtration
methods, including reverse osmosis, to remove chemical
contaminants. Then the water will be sent to covered tanks and
mixed with groundwater pumped from the village wells.

After three or four weeks, the blend will be sent back through
drinking-water treatment and distributed for use. The wastes
squeezed out during the reverse osmosis process, meanwhile, will be
concentrated in briny effluent, which the village will store for
use in dust control on roads, fighting fires, and, possibly, for
making artificial snow at the local ski area.

And then
the toilets will flush, and the sinks and tubs will drain, and the
cycle will repeat again - and if Nivison and his collaborators are
lucky, no one will think much about it.

"By any parameter
you can measure - suspended particles, salts, bacteria,
pharmaceuticals - the water from this process is going to be
extraordinarily clean," Thomson says. "But you have to overcome the
'yuck factor.' It's not measurable, it's not quantifiable, but it's
every bit as important as the particles you can measure."

"All we've done is recycle the same water on this earth
since the beginning of time,"

Mike Nivison says. "This is
just a more controlled environment for doing the same thing. I do
believe this will be our salvation."

He's right, of
course: Using water is fundamentally a matter of recycling.
Mathematically, you can show that the liquid pouring from your
faucet today probably contains some of the same water molecules
that George Washington drank in 1776. Remember the water cycle
diagram you saw in grade school: Two hydrogen atoms bound to one of
oxygen precipitate from clouds as rain or snow, seep into the soil,
transpire from leaves, get lapped up by animals, course through
streams and rivers, and finally settle, temporarily, in the ocean,
only to evaporate once again to start the cycle anew. The idea of
reuse is central to our understanding of water - perhaps even a bit
compelling, when it comes to sharing molecules with George
Washington.

It's a good deal less so when you're talking
about wastewater of newer vintage, such as the stuff they're going
to be cleaning up and drinking in Cloudcroft. As the West grows in
population, though, and as climate change seems to be decreasing
the reliability of some water supplies, some of the region's
residents are reconsidering the notion that effluent is something
to get rid of as efficiently as possible. Only a few are willing to
go quite as far, yet, as Mike Nivison, but many are at least
embracing the idea that wastewater is a valuable resource. What's
happening in Cloudcroft, then, is a portent of what is happening,
and what likely will happen, in other arid places.

But the prospect of brewing your morning
coffee with water that was recently washing greasy dishes or
flushing a neighbor's toilet has many people uneasy, and not just
because of what psychologists and water engineers alike call the
"yuck factor." The water to be recycled may carry a host of
pollutants, some recognized only recently. Among the most worrisome
are endocrine disruptors, which pose potentially large but as yet
incompletely proven health threats that are making some scientists
very nervous.

Twice in the last 10 years, San
Diego city officials have proposed augmenting the city's drinking
watersupply with water reclaimed from the city's sewers
- and twice, in 1999 and again last year, those plans have been
shot down.

It is a telling comment on the disjointed
nature of much water management in the United States that San Diego
has both a water-supply and a water-disposal problem. On the supply
side, the city imports between 85 and 95 percent of its water from
distant sources - specifically, from the Colorado River and the
California State Water Project, which conveys water from Northern
California to the state's dry southern half. Those sources have
historically been reliable, but only up to a point. In 1991, during
a severe drought, water project deliveries were on the verge of
being drastically cut when the rains finally came; this year, water
planners are asking users to make voluntary cutbacks. And current
climate projections suggest that the flow of the already
over-allocated Colorado River may decline significantly in the
future.

For wastewater disposal, San Diego relies on a
water-treatment plant at Point Loma whose technology is antiquated.
It discharges effluent that does not meet Clean Water Act standards
into the Pacific. San Diego has a waiver from the federal
Environmental Protection Agency allowing it to dump that effluent,
but the waiver expires in 2008. The cost of upgrading the Point
Loma facility to meet EPA standards has been estimated at $1
billion, and the city has yet to make plans to raise that money.

As part of a settlement agreement stemming from a lawsuit
by the EPA and environmental groups, San Diego agreed to reduce its
effluent discharge into the ocean by building two plants to treat
water for reuse in the city and its surroundings. Those plants are
now capable of putting out 37.5 million gallons of reclaimed,
non-potable water a day.

Like many other municipalities
in the West, San Diego sells some of its reclaimed water to buyers
who use it to water golf courses, feed industrial processes, and
flush toilets. It's distributed in a network of purple pipes to
distinguish it from the potable water supply, and it's currently
available at about a third the cost of potable water. The trouble
is that the purple-pipe network amounts to an entirely new,
parallel water system, and San Diego, like many other cities,
hasn't extended it very far.

"It's expensive to pay for
the distribution of recycled water," says Maria Mariscal, senior
water resources specialist for the San Diego County Water
Authority. "Installing purple pipe in new developments is OK, but
retrofitting in established areas can be expensive."

As a
result, the city is able to sell only about a third of its recycled
water capacity and is unlikely to meet its target, developed as
part of the lawsuit settlement, of selling at least 50 percent by
2010.

To figure out how to use more of the reclaimed
water, the city Water Department conducted a study that recommended
treating it intensively and returning it to the potable water
system. The system would be like Cloudcroft's on steroids: 16
million gallons a day rather than 100,000. Using the treated water
to supplement San Diego's drinking-water system at a single point
would be much more cost-effective than piping the treated water to
an entire network of dispersed users of non-potable water.

Turning treated effluent into drinking water is a
widespread practice. It's most commonly done when communities dump
their effluent into streams and rivers, knowing that other users
downstream will use the same water. But an increasing number of
communities are reusing their own water. In Orange County, El Paso,
Tucson, and many other Western communities, water agencies recycle
by dumping treated effluent on the ground so that it can soak in
and recharge aquifers. After that water's been underground for a
while, it is then pumped up for drinking water use.

San
Diego's topography, though, doesn't lend itself to recharging water
from the treatment plants into local aquifers. So planners proposed
pumping the treated effluent into a reservoir that feeds the city's
drinking water system. The city council's Natural Resources and
Culture Committee agreed and forwarded the proposal to the full
council. A wide range of stakeholders on a community panel agreed,
too.

"To me, this is a win-win," says Bruce Reznik,
executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, an environmental group
that monitors coastal pollution. "You're discharging less into the
ocean, and you're creating a local water supply that you otherwise
wouldn't have."

But opponents exploded, labeling the idea
with a visceral and unforgettable moniker of the sort no politician
can afford to ignore. "Your golden retriever may drink out of the
toilet with no ill effects," editorialized the San Diego
Union-Tribune under the headline "Yuck!". "But that
doesn't mean humans should do the same. San Diego's infamous
'toilet to tap' plan is back once again, courtesy of Water
Department bureaucrats who are prodding the City Council to adopt
this very costly boondoggle."

Mayor Jerry Sanders came to
much the same conclusion, announcing in July of last year that he
would not support the reservoir augmentation plan. A year later,
the City Council has yet to decide on any new wastewater reuse
strategies.

"It was certainly disappointing," says Jim
Crook, a consultant who helped draft California's water-reuse
guidelines in the 1970s and served on an independent task force
evaluating the city's proposal. "It was a good project from a
technical standpoint. We were very comfortable with what they were
going to do. The reclaimed water would be of a higher quality than
some of the raw water sources that are used now."

That,
indeed, is one of the principal ironies here: Before it could even
be used for reservoir augmentation, the water would be treated to a
higher standard than what San Diegans are drinking now. Water
discharged from the North City facility has already been shown to
be at least as clean as water in some of the city's reservoirs. If
it were to be dedicated to potable reuse, it would be subjected to
further intensive treatment, such as reverse osmosis, before being
pumped to the reservoir.

Reverse osmosis uses pressure to
force water through a membrane that allows water, but not most
other molecules, to pass through. It's expensive and
energy-intensive, but it is better than almost any other technology
at taking almost all contaminants out of water. Using it would
bring San Diego's erstwhile wastewater up to a much better quality
than, say, the Colorado River, which receives the waste from
hundreds of municipalities and industrial users by the time it
reaches Southern California. Las Vegas alone discharges roughly 60
billion gallons of wastewater a year some miles upstream of its own
water intake - a feat of urban engineering that would seem to prove
that most of what happens in Vegas really does stay there. What
happens in Sin City is fueled by prescription and over-the-counter
pharmaceuticals, caffeine, sunscreen, synthetic compounds used in
plastics and detergents, and even methamphetamines, say researchers
who have found all that in Lake Mead's water.

----

Las Vegas'
effluent is diluted as it flows downstream, and some of the
compounds in it are degraded by sunlight, destroyed by microbes, or
bound up in sediment. Still, monitoring in 2006 showed that water
entering San Diego's municipal system contained, before
drinking-water treatment, small but measurable quantities of
ibuprofen, the insect repellent DEET, and the anti-anxiety drug
meprobamate.

"We can have a lot more monitoring and
control if we oversee our own reclamation than if we're relying on
a river with a billion gallons of recharge from other sources every
day," says Bruce Reznik. "It's better to be drinking our own
'toilet to tap' water than someone else's. I'm pretty confident
that this would be a whole lot safer than what we're getting now."

In Windhoek, Namibia, water from a wastewater
treatment plant is piped right back into the drinking-water
system. NASA is developing advanced recycling technology
that will directly convert astronauts' urine into clean drinking
water. Such reuse systems are what a South African pioneer in water
reclamation, Lucas van Vuuren, was thinking of when he said, "Water
should be judged not by its history, but by its quality."
Sufficient treatment, he meant, assures that any water can be
reused. Windhoek is achingly dry and almost 500 miles from the
nearest perennial river. It costs NASA about $40,000 to send a
gallon of clean water up to the International Space Station. In
those situations it makes a lot of sense to clean - carefully - and
reuse wastewater.

Van Vuuren's is a technocrat's line,
though, because in fact most people's tools for judging water
quality aren't up to the task. Conventional wastewater treatment is
very good at removing the kind of contaminants people can detect
without laboratory equipment, such as odors, suspended particles,
and the sorts of bacteria that can cause illness. But most people
are relatively helpless when it comes to making more detailed
assessments of their water supply's safety. The lower Colorado
River looks clean enough; it's more likely to meet most people's
standards than cleaner water in a pipe outside a complex-looking
treatment plant.

As a result of that perceptual
shortfall, people are left with nothing but water's history as a
guideline, according to Brent Haddad of the University of
California at Santa Cruz, an environmental studies professor who
directs the university's new Center for Integrated Water Research.
When he began studying water policy, he says, "I kept going to
meetings with water managers, and they kept saying, 'How do we deal
with these irrational people?' - meaning their customers. I didn't
think they were irrational. I thought they were just using a
different sort of logic than the water managers and engineers.
People as they are generate feelings and opinions about some things
that are really based on intuition and not a technical analysis of
risk. They're based on what you might call ancient rules of thumb
about what's safe and what isn't."

A visceral aversion to unclean water, Haddad says, is an
understandable and useful tool that served the human species well
through most of its evolution. But it may not be particularly
helpful today, when it's necessary to make a decision between two
sources of water that are both clear and odorless - but from very
different sources.

"When people are aware of the history
of their water, it matters a lot to them," he says. "If there's an
unavoidable link to prior urban use, that's troubling to people.
It's extremely hard to convince people then that the treatment will
be good enough to override that history. But people are willing to
take Colorado River water or groundwater that's clearly been used
by other cities because it's easy to abstract away that use and
begin the water's history with its taking from the natural system."

Rivers and soils do, in fact, clean water. But the
psychological cleansing they do may be equally important. As a
result, even the Colorado River - however thoroughly dammed,
diverted, and delivered through aqueducts it may be - appears more
natural, and cleaner, to many people than what's produced by San
Diego's wastewater treatment plants. The river takes the yuck out.

The largely unwelcome prospect of drinking treated
effluent, though, forces people to ask what's in the water they're
already getting, whatever its source. Something long taken for
granted - what could be more American than good, drinkable tap
water? - becomes a public issue. And as people debate where their
future water supplies are going to come from, an increasing number
of experts and nonexperts alike are growing increasingly alarmed
about the chemicals flowing not only from Las Vegas, but from every
community.

Wastewater engineers are rightly
proud of what their industry achieved in the 20th
century, bringing safe drinking water to virtually every community
in the United States. But most wastewater treatment plants were not
designed to remove the sorts of complex organic chemicals that show
up in Lake Mead - or, to cite a more pristine-looking example,
Boulder Creek, which tumbles out of the Rocky Mountains and through
Boulder, Colo., before joining the South Platte River.

Back in 2000, David Norris thought Boulder Creek an unlikely place
to look for unhealthy fish. Even below the city's wastewater
treatment plant, the creek looked clean,

and
fish and other aquatic organisms lived throughout it. There was
none of the stench, the brown murk, or the belly-up fish associated
with the bad old days of piecemeal sewage treatment before the
Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.

Norris, an
endocrinologist at the University of Colorado - and an avid
fisherman - had read studies in the scientific literature
documenting the environmental effects of a poorly understood class
of pollutants known as endocrine disruptors. Unlike many toxins,
they didn't appear to be killing their victims outright. But in
Lake Apopka, Fla., a pesticide spill had caused lingering
reproductive failures and sexual abnormalities in alligators. In
Britain, odd-looking fish that were not readily identifiable as
males or females, but had sexual characteristics of both, were
turning up in anglers' creels - especially in waterways below
sewage outlets.

Norris and his colleagues, Alan Vajda and
John Woodling, figured that Boulder Creek's best indicators of
environmental quality were likely to be white suckers, a native
fish that's widespread and not terribly finicky about water
quality. "A good healthy freshwater stream has a good healthy
sucker population," he says. "If you really disturb this species,
you've really disturbed the ecosystem."

Norris had no
trouble finding white suckers both upstream and downstream of
Boulder's treatment plant. Upstream, everything seemed normal.
Downstream, it was not. "Much to our surprise," he says, "we were
appalled to see the extent of feminization in the fish population."
He found five female suckers for every male; further, 20 percent of
the fish were "intersex" individuals showing characteristics of
both sexes.

Alarmed, Norris looked for similar effects
elsewhere, and found them. Fish below wastewater treatment plants
in Denver and Colorado Springs showed some of the same symptoms. In
the South Platte River, where Denver releases its waste, he
couldn't find a single male sucker below the effluent outlet.
Something in the effluent, it appeared, wasn't killing fish, but
rather causing hormonal changes in them and producing female traits
in male fish.

The evidence was
circumstantial, though. Norris knew he had to more closely link
cause and effect - which is hard to do in a natural setting, where
fish in different reaches of the same stream might be feeding on
different food, facing different temperatures, and otherwise
dealing with widely variable conditions. So he and his colleagues
have since built two "Fish Exposure Mobiles," which are basically
mobile laboratories, built inside trailers, with fish-holding
tanks. By pumping combinations of river water and wastewater
effluent into the tanks on site, they're able to replicate the
pollution concentrations fish face at various distances below
treatment plants.

When they experimentally exposed
fathead minnows - widely used as a test fish - to water like that
below the Boulder treatment plant, Norris and his colleagues were
able to feminize male fish within 14 days. They have since tested
fish in other Colorado waterways below wastewater treatment plants
in the Rocky Mountains and on the Western Slope. Data from those
tests aren't available yet, but Norris will say that he is awfully
worried in general about the presence of endocrine-disrupting
chemicals in the environment, and in water specifically.

"It's fairly obvious that living populations are being subjected to
far more chemicals in the last 30 years than when biological
systems evolved, and so we wonder what effect that has on the
genetic machinery," he says. "If we want to increase the use of
wastewater, unless we're going to remove these compounds from the
water, we're going to increase their concentration in the human
population, since we're just going to be adding more of these
compounds. We keep concentrating our population in cities, and as a
result we're concentrating our effluent."

Most of the
organic compounds that can disrupt the endocrine system are neither
regulated by EPA standards nor often monitored in waterways or the
drinking-water system. Few thought they were a problem until
recently. But in a national survey published by the U.S. Geological
Survey in 2002, researchers found such substances in 80 percent of
the waterways they sampled.

The endocrine system is
essentially a complex signaling mechanism that tells genes and
cells when to do what. It operates by means of chemical messengers,
or hormones, that bind to certain receptors in cells.
Unfortunately, many of those receptors aren't particularly picky.
Receptors designed to react to the natural hormone estrogen, for
example, can also be set off by a wide range of other compounds,
from complex molecules that naturally occur in vegetables to
synthetic chemicals found in soaps, plastics, pesticides, cleaning
products and many of the other manufactured goods of modern
civilization. They get into sewage when people urinate, or shower,
or flush leftover pharmaceuticals down the toilet.

As in
Boulder Creek, waterborne endocrine disruptors have in many places
been shown to have harmful effects on aquatic organisms, especially
fish. For example, male carp with unusually high levels of female
hormones have been found in Lake Mead, where estrogen - the kind
naturally produced in human bodies as well as the synthetic variety
in birth-control pills - ends up when Las Vegans flush their
toilets. Recently, a team of Canadian biologists dosed an entire
small lake with synthetic estrogen at levels equivalent to those
often found in treated wastewater. They were able to wipe out
almost the entire minnow population in only a few years - again,
not by killing the fish, but by causing sexual changes in males and
females that made it impossible for those fish to reproduce.

Hormones naturally work at very low levels; a human
estrogen concentration as low as 1 part per trillion - so dilute
that it's near the lower limit of what monitoring equipment can
detect - has been shown to affect fish. The effluent dumped into
Boulder Creek typically contains from 1 to 10 parts per trillion of
human estrogen.

"People ask why such tiny levels have
such a devastating effect," says Norris. "But that's the level at
which hormones work. Parts per trillion is common stuff for an
endocrinologist."

Consumers are used to thinking
of drugs as having precisely tailored effects. But
endocrine disruptors don't work that way. Because many different
chemicals can activate a given set of hormone receptors, low doses
of quite different substances can combine into a higher dose.
That's one of the primary reasons a growing number of researchers
worry about possible implications for human health.

"What
happens when you have a summing-up of the effects of these
different chemicals?" asks Theo Colborn, a longtime pollution
researcher who runs the nonprofit Endocrine Disruption Exchange in
Colorado and coauthored the 1996 book Our Stolen
Future, one of the first popular publications to raise an
alarm about such compounds. "Some-times there's even a synergistic
effect between them. It's like adding 2 and 2 and getting 5."

Wastewater treatment lowers
concentrations of most trace organic compounds - often by an order
of magnitude or more - but it can't remove them all. As a result,
effluent often contains a stew of complex chemicals. A recent U.S.
Geological Survey study found that St. Vrain Creek, into which
Boulder Creek drains, carries measurable loads of at least 36
different compounds, including artificial fragrances, fire
retardants, antibacterial substances used in soaps, and substances
used to manufacture plastics. The extent to which those chemicals
work together to cause effects on the endocrine system - itself not
well understood - is a big unknown.

"The endocrine system
is much more than estrogens," says Catherine Propper, an
endocrinologist at Northern Arizona University who has studied the
effects of trace organics on amphibians. "We have this complicated
endocrine system, and every time we find new aspects of it, we find
they can be disrupted by some of these environmental contaminants."

----

It's difficult to draw lines of cause and effect between
exposure to endocrine disruptors and human disease or disorder
because people are exposed to so many chemicals from so many
sources over many years, and because some effects may take years or
decades to manifest themselves. But an increasing number of
researchers are finding strong correlations between the massive
increase in synthetic environmental contaminants produced since
World War II and such health problems as cancer, declining sperm
counts in male humans of all ages, increases in birth defects and
diabetes, and flawed fetal development.

Of course, humans
aren't exposed to the chemicals in effluent in the same way that
Boulder Creek's white suckers are; we aren't swimming in the water
24/7. And by the time a creek, or the Colorado River, enters our
faucets, the loads of trace organics poured into it from treatment
plants upstream have been significantly reduced. Natural processes,
such as degradation by ultraviolet light and the action of
microbes, do remove some chemicals from stream water, while others
chemically bind to sediment particles. But the intensity of water
use in the West means that, in many river systems, water is taken
in for further municipal use before natural cleansing mechanisms
can do their full work.

"Our rivers and lakes do clean
water, especially if they have long stretches between communities
using it," says Colborn. "But we've exceeded their carrying and
assimilation capacity."

That's especially true, Colborn
says, because so many sources contribute to the loads of trace
organic compounds carried by streams and rivers. While wastewater
treatment plants are perhaps the largest single sources, leaching
from septic systems, runoff from car washes and feedlots, leakage
from sewage pipes, and overflows from water-intensive natural gas
drilling all contribute doses.

When surface water is
taken in for municipal use, it is treated with filtration and
disinfection treatments that significantly reduce contaminant
concentrations. But low concentrations of some compounds - often in
the parts-per-trillion range - do remain to make their way into
drinking water.

Some water experts argue that the amounts
of endocrine disruptors people ingest in water are insignificant
compared to those we get from other sources - plastic containers,
foods, soaps, cosmetics, and many other products.

"In
terms of relative risk, the risk from drinking water is minuscule,"
says Kim Linton, senior account manager at the Denver-based
American Water Works Association Research Foundation. "For example,
DEET is one of the most persistent of these trace compounds. Are
people more likely to get sick from West Nile virus or from trace
levels in the water? Are they going to stop spraying themselves?"

No, most probably won't. But some biologists argue that
the cumulative effects of endocrine disruptors make it imperative
to reduce their concentrations anywhere possible.

"You
would have to drink incredible amounts of the water to amount to an
effect that these chemicals naturally have," says David Norris.
"But adult humans are getting estrogenic compounds from an
incredible number of sources. So any amount we get from water will
add to that, since these chemicals have additive effects.

"If wastewater is my only source of estrogenic compounds, I'm not
going to worry about it. But if I'm also getting them from my water
bottles, from my personal-care products, etc., then maybe that's
just enough to push me over the edge into prostate cancer or breast
cancer. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence in humans that is
supported by experimental work in mice and rats that suggests that
this may be a much bigger problem than a few intersex fish below a
wastewater treatment plant."

The
water-processing system has to balance needs and costs. People may choose to lower the quantities of trace organic
compounds they ingest with their water, but they're going to have
to pay to do so. And that means they'll have to consider how the
risk represented by these chemicals stacks up against others.

"What's more risky, bridges falling
or the water you drink?" asks Linton. "The utility folks are out
there prioritizing what to spend money on. They may need to focus
resources on putting a new pipe in rather than on removing a
minuscule level of contaminants. There's a cost associated with all
these things."

If consumers do decide they want to lower
their exposure to trace organics, though, then water-reuse projects
of the sort San Diegans have rejected, for now, may be a good way
to go. Such projects are expensive, but they have the virtue of
providing dual benefits: concentrations of contaminants that will
probably be as low as feasible, and a reliable flow.

Still, there are going to be cases where no amount of investment
and public outreach will suffice to assuage public concerns, where
the arguments about what's healthy and appropriate touch on realms
even more abstract than parts per trillion, and less quantifiable
than the yuck factor. One of the flashpoints in proposed reuse
projects, for example, is the San Francisco Peaks, a small mountain
range in northern Arizona. The owners of the Arizona Snowbowl want
to make artificial snow using treated municipal wastewater
purchased from the city of Flagstaff. The Snowbowl's skiing seasons
have been abbreviated in recent dry winters, and artificial snow
would instill an element of predictability in what has been a
highly unpredictable business.

But the idea provoked
outrage from environmentalists and from members of Southwestern
tribes, many of which consider the San Francisco Peaks sacred. The
Hopi, for example, see the Peaks as the home of the Kachinas,
deities who bring water; to traditional Hopis, making artificial
precipitation there is profoundly sacrilegious.

It is
offensive to many Navajos, too. Klee Benally, the son of a
traditional healer, has become a leading activist in the
Flagstaff-based Save the Peaks Coalition. Benally argues that the
source of the water - its history, in other words - renders it
incompatible with traditional spiritual uses of the San Francisco
Peaks, from the gathering of medicinal plants to a holistic view of
the entire mountain range as a sacred site.

"We have
standards that the EPA could never match," he says. "To have the
water coming from hospitals, from morgues, from industry - no
matter the process of reclamation, it could never be clean enough
to meet those standards from the Navajo perspective. Wastewater
would contaminate the entire ecosystem, the entire spiritual purity
of the mountain. It's like getting a shot of something: The needle
affects only a tiny, tiny area, but the medicine affects your whole
system. We couldn't restore it back to its natural state after that
contamination occurred."

The Forest Service, which leases
use of the ski area to the Snowbowl, approved the artificial snow
proposal; a coalition of tribes and environmental groups sued and
lost in U.S. District Court. But in March, a three-judge panel of
the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the coalition and
denied the snowmaking request, writing that the Forest Service had
inadequately assessed how the use of reclaimed wastewater might
affect both tribal religious practice and the health of skiers
exposed to artificial snow. The U.S. Department of Justice, on
behalf of the Forest Service, and the owners of the Snowbowl have
asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider that ruling.

There may not be many places where the potential use of
reclaimed water arouses quite as much passion as on the
San Francisco Peaks. But the yuck factor will surely continue to be
an issue water managers have to contend with. It seems to have deep
roots in human history and perception, after all, and perhaps will
be overcome on a wide scale only when it collides head-on with
another deep-rooted but not always accurate Western perception -
namely, that the water will always be there.

Already, as
the West's drought continues, California is looking for new means
of conserving water. This summer, the San Diego County Water
Authority, citing concerns about the reliability of future
deliveries from the State Water Project, began a campaign that
urges each of its customers to use 20 fewer gallons of water a day.

The campaign is voluntary, but it may help drive home the
message that external water supplies aren't assured - and that
recycling may be a reliable way of ensuring that at least some
water remains available. After all, people do keep showering, and
flushing, and drinking their coffee, no matter how little runoff
the Rockies or Sierra Nevada produce in a given year.

"Now that we're going into a dry-year cycle, we're seeing the
acceptance of water recycling go up," says the water authority's
Maria Mariscal. "Nothing gets the public's attention like a
drought."

Peter Friederici teaches journalism at
Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His latest book is
Nature's Restoration (Island Press, 2006).

This article was made possible with support from the
William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation and the Jay
Kenney Foundation.

Sidebars

]]>No publisherWaterArticleBiomass: What to do with all that woodhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/333/16661
Mark Sardella’s nonprofit group Local Energy is
determined to heat local communities with biomass energy, created
by burning logging slash and millwaste from New Mexican
forestsSANTA FE, New Mexico — Driving through the
thickly forested mountains around New Mexico’s state capital,
Mark Sardella doesn’t daydream about his next camping trip.
Instead, he thinks about the untapped heat locked up in all those
trees.

For Sardella, an engineer who moved to Santa Fe in
1996, finding homegrown heating solutions has been a mission since
2003, when he founded a nonprofit called Local Energy. At the top
of his group’s agenda is biomass energy — the
conversion of wood fiber and other organic materials into heat.

So far, Local Energy has developed small demonstration
biomass-heating projects at Santa Fe Community College and at the
nearby Santa Clara Pueblo. But Sardella has bigger plans. With the
help of a $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, Local Energy did a study showing how downtown Santa Fe
could be centrally heated from a clean and efficient biomass plant.

The study concluded that it would take about 20,000 tons
of biomass to heat downtown Santa Fe for a year. More than that is
currently available in the form of construction debris, waste from
small sawmills, and thinning slash from nearby forests — much
of it waste that people pay to discard at the landfill, Sardella
says.

"By using (millwaste and slash), you put the
dollars in low-income rural communities and keep them there. And
there’s a 400-year cultural tradition here of working in the
forest and using materials from it, so it’s cultural
preservation at the same time."

However, heating between
500 and 600 businesses and homes in downtown Santa Fe would require
a significant investment in boiler and piping equipment —
Sardella estimates the cost at about $23 million. Although natural
gas prices are rising, it’s an open question whether
businesses or city government can be persuaded to pay that kind of
money.

Using wood for energy production is hardly a new
idea: Much of downtown Flagstaff, Ariz., was centrally heated in
the early 20th century by steam produced from burning a local
sawmill’s scrap. The University of Idaho has been centrally
heating its Moscow campus for 20 years by burning waste from local
mills. A federal program, Fuels for Schools, subsidizes schools
that install biomass boilers, mainly in the Northern Rockies; one
of the schools, in Darby, Mont., reported saving $90,000 in heating
oil costs during the last school year. Modern biomass burners, some
of which are designed to generate electricity, can burn as cleanly
as those that use natural gas.

Making the process work
economically, though, is tricky. Wood is bulky, heavy and expensive
to transport, so it generally has to be used near the place it was
produced — no easy feat in a rugged, expansive state like New
Mexico. It also has to compete with the familiar convenience of
natural gas. Finally, using it on a scale larger than a simple home
woodstove requires investment in new infrastructure, such as wood
chippers, boilers, and piping.

"It’s still more
expensive to harvest the stuff than cut it down and leave it in the
woods," says Jerry Payne, an Albuquerque-based bioenergy specialist
for the Forest Service.

Yet Payne has seen a growing
number of projects on the drawing board. Western Water and Power
Production recently inked a deal to sell the electricity from a
proposed 35-megawatt biomass plant to PNM, New Mexico’s
largest electric utility. The plant would be built east of the
Manzano Mountains in the central part of the state and begin
operation in 2009, consuming about a thousand tons of wood biomass
a day to produce enough electricity for about 25,000 homes.

Most of that fuel would come from forest-thinning
projects on state and private land, but the company expects to
acquire up to a quarter of its supply from Cibola National Forest,
which makes some environmentalists nervous. "Creating an entirely
new market force on public lands is not something we look forward
to," says Bryan Bird of Forest Guardians. "It’s going to be a
voracious monster that needs to be fed."

Todd Schulke of
the Center for Biological Diversity also has reservations about the
proposed plant, largely because it would use primarily piñon
and juniper trees. The ecology of piñon-juniper woodlands is
not as well understood as ponderosa pine forests, which are
generally agreed to be overgrown with small trees. Yet Schulke
believes that New Mexico’s biggest forest-health problem
— too many trees — could be eased, at least for a few
decades, by cutting trees for energy. "We have a big job in front
of us — there’s tons of wood available," says Schulke.
"But wood isn’t really a renewable resource in the Southwest.
I see this as a one-shot deal."

New tools are available
to assess wood supply. In northern New Mexico, the ForestERA
program, run by biologists from Northern Arizona University, is
analyzing conditions across 6 million acres in order to determine
restoration priorities. That may help planners figure out what a
truly sustainable wood harvest looks like.

For now,
though, even apparently simple biomass projects can be hard to
carry out. In southwest New Mexico, it has taken three years of
pressure and about $750,000 in state funding to near the goal of
installing a wood-heating boiler at Fort Bayard, a state hospital
outside Silver City. That boiler should provide Gila WoodNet, a
nonprofit that conducts forest thinning and economic development
work in the area, with a vital new market. Burning an estimated
3,000 tons of wood chips a year instead of natural gas should pay
for the installation of the new boiler within about seven years,
Payne says.

That’s a nice savings, says Gila
WoodNet’s Gordon West, but what’s most important to the
community is that "the state will spend that money in Grant County
rather than paying it out to some company elsewhere." West says his
group’s biggest challenge now is developing the economic
infrastructure — from supplying the trees, to drying the wood
to financing — to feed a biomass plant. "There are about 10
fronts you have to develop, and you have to work on all of them at
once."

In the end, state — and eventually federal
— initiatives will likely be needed to make biomass a viable
energy source. New Mexico law requires the state’s utilities
to produce at least 10 percent of the electricity they sell from
renewable sources by 2011, and biomass could be a part of that mix.

Mark Sardella says biomass will eventually compete very
well against traditional sources, such as natural gas. "Call your
natural gas supplier and ask if you can lock in your current rate
for even five years — you can’t do it," Sardella says.
"Sure, there is risk in spending millions on new energy
infrastructure, but you have to weigh that against the real risk of
going bankrupt if you don’t change."

The Forest
Service’s Jerry Payne has a useful metaphor for the
challenge: "Using wood biomass is almost like the Wal-Mart effect,"
he says. "No, we’re not going to make a lot of money, but
there’s a lot of product out there."

This story is a sidebar to the feature

In northern New Mexico, the Collaborative Forest
Restoration Program brings Hispanic loggers and Anglo
environmentalists together to work on creating healthy, sustainable
forests and rural economies

]]>No publisherWildlifeArticlePeace Breaks Out In New Mexico's Forestshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/333/16654
In northern New Mexico, the Collaborative Forest
Restoration Program brings Hispanic loggers and Anglo
environmentalists together to work on creating healthy, sustainable
forests and rural economiesVALLECITOS, New Mexico — When Bryan Bird drives up the
winding road near this northern New Mexico village, he remembers
the effigies he saw one stormy evening. The eerie figures swayed
ominously from the forest’s ponderosa pines. Made of
someone’s cast-off clothes, they represented
environmentalists Sam Hitt and John Talberth — "and their
wives," Bird adds, "which wasn’t very nice."

It was
1995, and Bird had just begun working with Hitt and Talberth at
Forest Guardians, a hard-nosed environmental group based in Santa
Fe. He was headed to a campsite to join activists protesting the
proposed La Manga timber sale on the Carson National Forest.

Vallecitos is little more than an hour’s drive
north of Santa Fe, but culturally it’s a long way from the
state’s cosmopolitan capital. In the mid-’90s, times
were hard. Logging had slowed dramatically since the 1940s and
’50s, when there were 72 lumber mills in New Mexico’s
upper Rio Grande Basin. A large timber mill was in the middle of a
drawn-out shutdown. Then, in August 1995, a federal judge halted
all logging on national forest land in New Mexico and Arizona, in
response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the threatened Mexican
spotted owl.

Rural residents throughout the state were
outraged, but nowhere more than in traditional Spanish-speaking
villages like Vallecitos. The Southwest’s logging industry
was dying for many reasons, including past overcutting, increased
global competition, and mills that failed to retool to handle
smaller trees. But people needed a scapegoat, and the
uncompromising rhetoric of Hitt and his cohorts made it easy to
point accusatory fingers at environmental groups full of urban
Anglo newcomers. One day, a pipe bomb appeared in the Forest
Guardians mailbox.

Bird and
his compatriots lost their battle against the sale, but they may
have won the war. For economic reasons, the La Manga area was never
logged, although sawyers cut down a few big yellow pines "just to
spite us," Bird says. But there are no effigies swinging in New
Mexico’s forests today. "Everybody has taken a deep breath
and stood down," Bird says. "Things have calmed down quite a bit
since then."

And it’s not the calm that follows a
death, when there’s nothing left to fight about. Since 2001,
an innovative federal program known as the Collaborative Forest
Restoration Program (CFRP) has made at least part-time allies of
former foes in New Mexico’s environmental wars. Because of
this program, Bird drove out to the Carson on a humid August
morning this year to meet with a logger.

It’s a
neat turn of events: Diehard logging opponents propose
tree-cutting, while loggers scramble to align with environmental
groups. Peace has broken out where violence once threatened, and,
in small communities like Vallecitos, a few loggers are once again
working in the woods. The new program has hatched a new forest
industry in the state, but no one is sure whether it will grow into
a truly sustainable logging economy. Like most of the trees in the
Southwest’s tangled and fire-ripe forests, the program is
young and green. So far, it has yielded more good vibes than
treated acres.

Still, in a land where historic
animosities often simmer just below the surface, good vibes are
worth a considerable amount.

The logger Bird is here to
meet is Alfonso Chacon. He runs cattle on the forest, thins trees
for the Forest Service, and for a little extra cash, sells firewood
and latillas — the slender posts used in Southwestern
architecture and fencing. "I make 100 percent of my living out of
the woods," he says.

It’s a life that, if not quite
hardscrabble, is certainly hard work. It is also traditional.
Chacon’s family has lived in the Ojo Caliente area for
generations. Much of today’s Carson National Forest was once
part of large land grants managed in common by Hispano communities.
Some locals still deeply resent the federal government’s
acquisition of these lands.

The grizzled Chacon and the
youthful, raven-haired Bird make an odd couple. But touring the La
Ensenada thinning area, they are all smiles. Thanks to a three-year
$360,000 CFRP grant that he won with Forest Guardians’ help,
Chacon has been thinning small conifers here from 260 acres, where
pines, firs and aspens intermingle with grassy meadows.

The project is designed to reduce wildfire danger and promote the
growth of the remaining trees, along with grasses and other
understory plants. After a century of livestock grazing, big-tree
logging, and fire suppression, Southwestern forests today —
especially those dominated by ponderosa pine — tend to be far
denser and more susceptible to high-intensity fires than they were
in the past. Large wildfires have torched communities, including
Los Alamos, N.M., in 2000, and Heber and Summerhaven, Ariz., in
2003. Out of those ashes has grown a widespread consensus that some
thinning of small trees is necessary to reduce wildfire danger and
restore more natural conditions. There is also a recognized need
for regular low-intensity fires to keep the fuel loads down.

----

The CFRP granting process solidifies and deepens that
consensus. Applicants are required to work with a wide range of
stakeholders. Chacon and a colleague, Hispano activist and
grantwriter Luis Torres (also a member of
HCN’s board of directors), asked Forest
Guardians to join their proposal. "We were the grand prize," Bird
says, because of the Guardians’ reputation for not
compromising. The group agreed to participate, with the proviso
that the project’s thinning prescriptions would be altered to
save habitat for Abert’s squirrels, which prefer stands of
trees with interlocking canopies.

"It was very
refreshing, meeting Alfonso," Bird says. "He’s vocal about
his love for the land and the forests, and I immediately had trust
that he wanted to do the right thing."

Chacon likes to
boast that he’s never cut a big tree, and his handiwork today
bears no resemblance to the old days of industrial-scale logging,
when Southwestern logging sites were rife with big stumps and
churned-up soil. The stand is open and sunny, rich with mid-sized
ponderosa pines, white-barked aspens, and — thanks to this
summer’s plentiful monsoon rains — verdant grasses.
Chacon darts around with the agility of a much younger man, lifting
up cut fir branches to reveal new grasses and mushrooms thriving in
the shelter and moisture they provide.

"This is the best
the forest has ever looked," he says. Indeed, it’s hard to
believe it’s been logged, until Chacon points out the many
small stumps, about the diameter of cups and saucers. His crew cut
those trees with chain saws, lopped the branches off, and carried
the wood out of the forest by hand.

Chacon sold some of
them as latillas and others as firewood. But that wasn’t
nearly enough to pay for the necessary equipment, gasoline and
labor. That’s where the CFRP grant comes in. It provides
Chacon $120,000 a year — minus taxes — to do the work.
Yet there’s more than tree-cutting involved: Chacon must
collaborate with a variety of stakeholders, including Forest
Guardians. And he has to develop a monitoring plan, so the effects
of his work can be recorded.

So Chacon contracted with
the Forest Guild, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that specializes in
community forestry projects. The Guild coordinated the development
of an ecological monitoring plan that measures such variables as
canopy cover, fuel loads, understory plant cover, and stand
clumpiness, a factor important to Abert’s squirrels. Last
summer, youths from the local community group Las Communidades
spent two days on the thinning site learning how to measure those
variables. It’s knowledge that might help them find work in
the woods in the future.

This is the CFRP ideal: Work
that helps both the woods and the local economy. And everybody
involved in the project learns something — including how to
get along.

"We’re creating very powerful alliances
here of land-based communities and environmental groups," Bird
says, as he and Chacon look at mushrooms together. "We’re
finding a common love of the land."

Of course, "We still
have some disagreements," as Bird says later. "We don’t agree
about cattle grazing. But for now, we’re focusing on what we
can agree on." And one thing they agree on is that they benefit by
working together. Forest Guardians builds rapport with local
communities, and Chacon gains an ally with considerable expertise
in battling the Forest Service, the agency his community has
wrestled with for generations.

"You know what, Bryan, I
think I’ve changed a lot of people’s minds about you
around here," Chacon tells Bird. "I mean that. Sometimes
we’re going to have to get you to fight in the courtroom, and
we’ll be out here backing you 100 percent."

The
Collaborative Forest Restoration Program owes its existence to a
man named Walter Dunn, who coordinates the program from the Forest
Service’s Southwestern Region office in Albuquerque. Before
and after he did his graduate work in conflict resolution at the
University of Idaho, Dunn worked in Latin America for the Peace
Corps and for the Forest Service Office of International Programs.
He helped design community-based forestry and economic development
projects. Work conditions were challenging, he recalls:
Occasionally, some members of indigenous communities would "show up
for meetings packing Uzis under their ponchos."

Dunn soon
realized that the technical details of forestry projects were less
important than the social ones. "What led to their success or
failure was more the durability of their partnerships than
technical decisions such as spacing of the trees," he says. "As a
natural resource manager, that was quite a surprise to me."

Dunn brought this perspective with him to Capitol Hill in
1998, when, as part of a Brookings Institution legislative-affairs
fellowship, he began to work on natural resource issues for New
Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D. He helped craft legislation
allocating $5 million a year for community-based forest restoration
projects in New Mexico. The legislation passed Congress in 2000:
CFRP was born. Over the past five years, the program has doled out
three-year grants of up to $360,000 to 75 projects throughout New
Mexico. Today, those projects are thinning trees on about 20,000
acres of public and tribal land, in ecosystems ranging from
riparian bosques to montane mixed-conifer forests. According to an
assessment written last year by a technical review panel, they have
created some 500 jobs in tree-cutting, wood-processing, and
monitoring work.

Decisions about which projects to fund
are made not by the Forest Service or other land-management
agencies, but by a technical advisory panel made up of agency
managers and members from a variety of local groups, communities
and tribes.

----

The panel sets high standards and makes its
decisions by consensus, says Melissa Savage, a retired UCLA forest
ecologist now living in Santa Fe, who served on the panel in the
program’s first years. "It was the most pleasurable
collaborative project I’ve ever been on," she says. "A lot of
knowledge is shared. The forest community is small in New Mexico,
and there’s now a wonderfully good feeling around that
community."

The grants have gone to a wide range of
applicants, including many tribes, a number of small start-up
businesses, even a Taos pottery collective. Applications must be
submitted by an ad hoc consortium of stakeholders, rather than by a
single entity. It is perhaps a sign of the "wonderfully good
feeling" Savage describes that Forest Guardians, once so hated for
its opposition to logging, won its own $360,000 grant this year.
It’s for a fire-protection project on the Santa Fe National
Forest that will entail cutting numerous trees for roadside
firebreaks.

"A couple of years ago, the idea of a group
like Forest Guardians saying anything complimentary about anything
the Forest Service was doing — that would have been
astounding," says Dunn. He believes the alliances created by CFRP
will ultimately lead to better-designed projects that detour
smoothly around the roadblocks of the past.

In another
sign of today’s changed relationships, Forest Guardians
joined the Center for Biological Diversity in signing onto a set of
"New Mexico Forest Restoration Principles" this May. The 11 other
organizations involved include the Forest Service, the state
forestry service, and the state’s largest electric utility.
The principles, which support the harvesting of small-diameter
trees for energy production, echo those of the CFRP: Collaborate;
leave large trees standing; use low-impact techniques; monitor.

Clear evidence of declining forest health has encouraged
environmental groups to embrace limited logging. "We’d been
after the Forest Service to stop cutting old growth," says Todd
Schulke of the Center for Biological Diversity, "but now there was
this clear problem with fire. We saw that, from a management
standpoint, the Forest Service had much stronger arguments for
thinning than it ever had had for old-growth logging."

Schulke has been a prime mover in Gila WoodNet, a CFRP-funded
project that thins small-diameter trees from the Gila National
Forest near Silver City and turns them into value-added products
such as furniture, house trusses, and cabins. He’s come a
long way since the 1990s, when his group played a key role in
shutting down most of the Southwest’s logging industry (HCN,
3/30/98). These days, "I spend more time talking about economics
and utilization (of wood) than I do about ecology," he says. It is
because of CFRP that the Forest Service has his ear, he says: "We
wouldn’t even be able to have conversations with the agency
if we didn’t have these resources to offer."

Though
they now wield chain saws, their groups’ core values have not
changed. "We believe strongly in a healthy tension between
enforcing existing laws and demonstrating that we want proactive
work on the ground," Bird says. "The people who fund us want us to
hold a line there."

Luis Torres, however, says the
"wonderfully good feeling" in the forestry community has its
limits. He and Chacon are often frustrated by what they see as a
hidebound federal agency: the Forest Service.

Each
national forest in New Mexico has a CFRP coordinator. Ignacio
Peralta works for the Carson, and Chacon and Torres have recently
been arguing with him over the disposal of logging slash from one
of the Ensenada thinning sites. Chacon and Torres say the project
proposal doesn’t require them to remove the slash; Peralta
maintains that it does. Peralta says a compromise is being worked
out, but in the meantime the dispute has kept Chacon and his
loggers off the project since early summer. For Torres, a longtime
Hispano activist, it’s a reminder of still-painful wounds in
the relationship between traditional communities and the federal
agency.

"The greatest amount of energy in running a CFRP
project goes to relating to the Forest Service," says Torres. "The
legislation is so loose that the implementation is left up to the
(Forest Service) coordinators. The CFRP is a penetration of
community-based forestry into the old system," he adds, "but it did
not have built into it reform of the Forest Service."

Torres believes the program’s method of dispersing funds
works to the disadvantage of small operators like Chacon. Grantees
receive most of their funding in the form of reimbursements rather
than advances, and that can be a challenge for small operators with
limited capital. Torres has lobbied to change that. Dunn, however,
says paying more advances would require more paperwork. That would
mean that more of the program’s budget would go to
administrative costs, currently about 16 percent of the $5 million
annual budget. "I’d rather see that money go to grants," Dunn
says.

Yet if the CFRP process has been hard on the
grantees, it has probably been even more challenging for the Forest
Service. The agency is not accustomed to working with outside
grantees or sharing decision-making power with an outside panel.

"It’s their (the Forest Service’s) land,"
says Melissa Savage, "and now they’re being asked to
accommodate a collaborative project that can bring a lot of money
and resources onto the forest. They should be delighted. Some are."

"I don’t know that I’d call it a conflict,"
says Ruben Montes, CFRP coordinator on the Santa Fe National
Forest, "but a readjustment has been needed by some of the old
guard who weren’t used to having outside groups in the
driver’s seat on these projects. I had to do quite a bit of
mediation to help the groups meet each other halfway."

----

Some CFRP projects have run afoul of the kind of bureaucratic
snares that have entangled other national forest projects. Most
projects have been carried out where the agency had previously
analyzed environmental impacts under the National Environmental
Policy Act. But not all: Savage has worked on two grants intended
to thin dense forests on the Santa Fe’s Rowe Mesa, where the
nonprofit Quivira Coalition operates a livestock grazing grassbank
(HCN, 9/5/05: Rangeland Revival). The first grant was awarded in
2001, and the work carried out between then and 2004. The second
grant, awarded in 2004, was stalled because the agency had not
completed its NEPA analysis.

Once it did complete the
analysis, a familiar opponent appealed it: Sam Hitt, the Forest
Guardians founder, who now runs a tiny advocacy group called Wild
Watershed. He says the project lacks sufficient monitoring of
impacts on wildlife. The first CFRP thinning project on Rowe Mesa
was "a disaster," he says. "It looks horrible. I see a spiderweb of
two-track roads out there where people drove in to collect
firewood."

Hitt, who left Forest Guardians in 2001, is
guarded when he talks about his former colleagues’ new
alliances. "I’ve expressed my reservations to them," he says.
"I would resist being embedded in that process. I would want to
maintain independence."

But Savage believes environmental
groups gain more from participating in projects than appealing
them. By applying for grants under CFRP, she says, "They’ll
have direct experience of the challenges and opportunities. The
projects are harder to do than just to say that this is how it
should be done."

The Forest Service recently sent a
largely positive assessment of CFRP to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, which will forward it to Congress. The report is
unlikely to have much effect on New Mexico; CFRP’s enabling
legislation has no sunset date, although the program’s
funding needs annual authorization.

But the report may
stimulate interest in other states. Last year, Rep. Rick Renzi,
R-Ariz., introduced a bill that would expand the Collaborative
Forest Restoration Program to Arizona, using an additional $5
million in annual funding; it has not yet made it out of the House
Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. Sen. Larry Craig,
R-Idaho, has also expressed interest in the program. But in these
times of huge budget deficits and agency cuts, expansion of CFRP is
a tough sell.

It’s worth asking, too, exactly how
much the program has actually accomplished. The acreage it has
treated is minuscule compared to the entire state. Almost 180,000
acres of national forest in New Mexico were treated in some way in
fiscal year 2005, the Forest Service says, through projects funded
by the controversial Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and through
acts of nature such as the lightning strikes that ignite managed
fires. This makes the CFRP’s achievements — 20,000
acres over five years — seem tiny, especially compared to the
3.3 million acres of New Mexico timberland that the Forest Service
says are in need of treatment.

And it’s not cheap.
"The per-acre costs for CFRP projects are relatively high," says
Marlin Johnson, assistant director for forestry and forest health
in the Forest Service’s Albuquerque office. "But," he adds,
"they are an investment in the future, in that the collaborative
relationships we are developing with communities should pay
dividends in less controversy over future activities."

The projects are also regarded as an important educational tool.
Rick DeIaco, for example, says several CFRP-funded projects carried
out in and around Ruidoso in southern New Mexico’s Sacramento
Mountains have encouraged private landowners to work on their own
land.

As a result, some 50 jobs in tree-trimming and
related work have been created locally to thin private forests.
Local entrepreneurs, funded in part by CFRP grants, collect some
60,000 cubic yards of wood, trimmed branches, and downed pine
needles each year and turn it into animal bedding, compost and
mulch.

"The CFRP seed money has really led to something
sustainable in this case," says DeIaco, who serves as Ruidoso
village forester. "Investing in human capital — that keeps
going."

Still, no one disputes that CFRP projects have
had a relatively modest economic impact, and have made only a small
dent in New Mexico’s forest-health problem. Most have focused
on simple tree-thinning rather than on true ecological restoration.
But that may be changing: Several new projects are looking at
larger landscapes.

One of those projects will teach local
youth to assess how much wood can sustainably be removed from the
74,000 acres of Carson National Forest surrounding Vallecitos. This
baseline survey could lead to more ambitious projects.

But as CFRP projects tackle larger forest areas, the odds increase
that some environmentalists will oppose them. So will the chances
— and the consequences — of disagreements between
Forest Service officials who are used to making decisions, and
local groups like Las Communidades or loggers like Chacon. A lot
rides on the new relationships being forged by the current CFRP
projects.

Watching Chacon and Byrd walk together through
the forest, though, you can’t help but feel some optimism.
Back in the mid-20th century, when there were jobs in the woods, no
one thought about sustainability; the mills in northern New Mexico
processed lumber at a rate at least 25 percent greater than the
region’s annual tree growth. That angered the environmental
community. But sustainability was also forgotten in the 1990s, when
the entire regional logging industry — even some small-scale
fuelwood harvesting — was shut down by environmental
lawsuits. Again, animosity was nurtured by the lack of a middle
path.

Today, you can see a middle path emerging from the
dense thicket of the past. On the same day Bird and Chacon met at
the Ensenada site, John Ussery of Las Communidades was not far
away, overseeing a new sort of work at the mothballed Vallecitos
sawmill. Among other things, Ussery’s grant calls for him to
make use of the enormous pile of bark and shavings composting
behind the mill, a relic of the days when huge yellow pines were
dismantled with a 54-inch circular blade. Before day’s end, a
small fleet of semi-trucks pulled out of the yard, hauling 100
cubic yards of aged mill waste to an organic farm near Abiquiu.
Perhaps the social tools forged in the heat of New Mexico’s
forest wars can likewise pull something at once new, productive and
sustainable from the ashes of the past.

Peter
Friederici writes from Flagstaff, Arizona, where he teaches
journalism at Northern Arizona University. His latest book is
Nature’s Restoration (Island Press, 2006). This
story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable
Foundation.

Sidebar

Mark Sardella’s nonprofit group Local Energy is
determined to heat local communities with biomass energy, created
by burning logging slash and millwaste from New Mexican
forests

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityCommunitiesNew MexicoArticleFor this English chef, home is the Colorado
Plateauhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/309/15878
Chef John Sharpe has created a gourmet restaurant in the
desert town of Winslow, Ariz., far from his birthplace in the misty
green landscape of EnglandOn Sunday mornings, all summer long, you can
find chef John Sharpe at the Flagstaff Community Market, moving
among the outdoor produce stalls with the practiced intensity of a
hardcore bargain hunter at an outlet mall.

He tests the
white peaches Rob Lautze has grown at Garland’s Orchard near
Sedona: nice, but not enough of them for his purposes. Most of the
crop froze this year, Lautze tells him.

"Oh, how
terrible," Sharpe says. But he’s pleased to hear that
Gravenstein apples are coming soon. Sharpe likes to bake with them,
and they feature in his apple and green tomato chutney.

He pronounces it "to-mah-to." Sharpe hails from England, but his
current surroundings are about as unlike that green and misty land
as can be imagined. As chef at the Turquoise Room Restaurant in
Winslow, Ariz., he cooks sumptuous meals from local produce amid
the sere badlands and plains of the Painted Desert.

Sharpe came to the United States because he felt it suited his
entrepreneurial spirit, and he spent the 1990s as a hard-driving
restaurateur in southern California’s Orange County. In 1997,
a friend bought and began restoring Winslow’s run-down La
Posada Hotel, designed in the late 1920s by the renowned architect
Mary Colter.

"He told me, ‘I need to put a
restaurant here, but don’t know how to do it,’ " Sharpe
recalls. "I said, ‘I’ll come up whenever I can free my
ass from alligators.’ I had 350 employees, four restaurants.

"I had absolutely no intention of moving to Winslow," he
says. "But one thing led to another, and that was it. I wanted to
be a chef again."

Two years later, Sharpe and his wife,
Patricia, moved to the Painted Desert. Orange County was booming,
and had an unemployment rate of 4 percent. Winslow adjoins the
Navajo and Hopi reservations, and its unemployment varied from 20
to 40 percent. The town’s main claim to fame was a line in
"Take it Easy," a ’70s-era Eagles song about a guy trying to
hitchhike out of town. Local tastes ran more to chicken-fried steak
than to roast duck with quince and blackberry sauce.

But
Sharpe set about establishing a culinary landmark, and he’s
succeeded. Gourmet magazine has praised the restaurant. Interstate
40 travelers expecting a truck-stop meal are surprised —
most, but not all of them, pleasantly — by Sharpe’s
cuisine. Some Winslow residents are regulars, and other northern
Arizona residents frequently drive long distances to eat at the
Turquoise Room.

Although Sharpe came to Winslow from
afar, he doesn’t see the Turquoise Room as an alien import.
While he flies in fish from Alaska, he loves the freshness of local
foods, and he likes to support regional suppliers. He employs and
trains local people — Native American, Hispanic, Anglo. He
buys churro lambs — a breed adapted to aridity — from a
Navajo family. He buys traditional piki corn bread from Hopi women,
and goat cheese from farmers nearby.

He also haunts the
weekly Flagstaff market, seeing what turns up. On the same day that
he finds out about the Gravenstein apples, he buys three flats of
beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes, choosing the soft ones other
shoppers eschew. He can use them, soon, for slicing or sauces. He
buys basil, melons, okra, and eggplant raised near Phoenix.
He’ll turn the eggplant into something he calls "native
ratatouille" — supplemented with corn and tepary beans
— and he’ll have some left over. "I’ll make
something else with it, too," he says. "I’ll figure it out on
the drive back."

The author writes from
Flagstaff, Arizona.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesArizonaPoliticsProfilesArticleFor this logger, twisted trees are the futurehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/297/15483
Woodworker Gordon West turns small and irregular pine logs
into useful building materials in his shop near Silver City,
N.M. In a corner of his airy shop near Silver
City, N.M., Gordon West is working out the kinks in Southwestern
forestry. In a small way, of course: Everything he does is intended
to work in a small way.

West, a middle-aged logger,
woodworker and builder, is testing a long metal machine that
resembles an overgrown lathe. Its working space is occupied by a
4-foot-long, 5-inch-diameter pine log. Crooked and welted with
knots, it looks better suited to stoking a campfire than supporting
a roof.

But to West, this log represents the future. His
new machine, built to West’s specifications by a local
machinist, has an integrated bandsaw, drill and laser sight. It
will allow West to take small and irregular ponderosa pine logs
— culled from the nearby Gila National Forest during thinning
operations — and trim and drill them so that they can be
connected together and used interchangeably in building houses. It
is part of his crusade to make the economics and technology of
modern construction conform to the ecological realities of
Southwestern forests.

"With this equipment," says West,
"you can turn these logs into trusses that you can use as precisely
as milled logs, even though they’re all random and bent."

West is fair-haired and wears owlish glasses, and he
grins a lot — especially when he contemplates his new
equipment. "I’m going to have a lot of fun with this," he
says. "Ah, new toys."

West’s one-man company, Santa
Clara Woodworks, develops innovative uses for small-diameter logs
— something many in the Southwest have attempted, but with
little success. He is also working on a new product called
Chipcrete, which will turn wood chips into durable bricks that can
be used like cinder blocks. And he’s turning a wide-tired
Mercedes truck chassis into a new yarder that will haul small logs
from the woods with minimal impact on soils and plants. He funds
these various projects with grants and the earnings from his
products.

West also serves on the board of directors of
the nonprofit Gila WoodNet, a handful of loggers and
environmentalists who aim to both thin the forest and help the
local economy. At least 10,000 acres of publicly owned ponderosa
forest need to be thinned near Silver City, according to an
assessment by the Forest Service and Gila WoodNet, because more
than a century of fire suppression has allowed the growth of dense,
fire-prone thickets of spindly trees. But the annual pace of the
thinning has been deliberately slow — 500 acres each year
— because West and his allies want to ensure that the work in
the forest can last.

Gila WoodNet is a vertically
integrated business. It sends people into the woods to cut trees,
following restoration plans agreed to by its members and the Forest
Service. Then, it works to turn the wood into marketable products.
"Big industry isn’t where it’s at," West says.
"I’d like to see dispersed small industries. The more
dispersed an industry is, the more stable it is, and the less
likely to crash."

Shaping a healthier forest, and a
healthier local economy, is West’s first goal. "Making money
comes second — though it does come," he says. "But you
don’t care so much about making a lot of money if
you’re already doing what you want to do."

The author writes from Flagstaff,
Arizona.

]]>No publisherWildlifePoliticsProfilesArticleStargazers defend darkness in Arizonahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/216/10890
The Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition's struggle to keep the
stars visible has led to the city's designation as the first
"International Dark-Sky City."FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Lance Diskan had a dark reason for moving to this small city on the Colorado Plateau.

"I grew up in New England, where there were stars, and then moved to L.A., where I could see exactly 11 stars," says Diskan, a community organizer and health educator at Northern Arizona University.

"One of the things we required when we had children was that they be able to see the stars," he says. "We wanted them to have the unlimited imaginative potential that comes from looking at the stars. Part of being human is looking up at the stars and being awestruck."

Now, as one of the founders of the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition, Diskan is part of an innovative effort to ensure that Flagstaff residents and visitors continue to have that opportunity. It's a concern that echoes throughout the West.

Around the world, and particularly in the energy-hungry United States, a flood of artificial lighting obscures the stars. A study recently published in an astronomy journal estimated that two-thirds of Americans cannot see the Milky Way.

Even the wide-open West isn't immune. Chad Moore, a California-based National Park Service researcher who works on light pollution issues, thinks that not a single national park in the Lower 48 is unaffected by light pollution.

"When the skies are so pristine, like in remote parks, it's easy to spoil them," he says. "We can detect cities up to 150 miles away in remote parks." Even in Death Valley, he notes, the skyglow from Los Angeles is visible.

The effects are many: Astronomers' work is more difficult, and locals have to pay for more electricity. David Crawford of the International Dark-Sky Association, based in Tucson, Ariz., estimates that the U.S. habit of spilling light into the sky costs at least $2 billion every year.

"Skylight City"

If any place is acutely aware of its sky, it is Flagstaff, which was dubbed the "Skylight City" in the 1890s, thanks to its high elevation and clear, dry skies. In 1894, astronomer Percival Lowell founded an observatory here, and Flagstaff astronomers discovered Pluto in 1930. Today, half a dozen major telescopes ring the city.

In 1958, Flagstaff passed what are thought to have been the world's first lighting restrictions in order to protect the views from those observatories; in 1988, the city and Coconino County passed two of the world's most comprehensive lighting ordinances.

The ordinances prohibited the grossest wastes of light, such as searchlights and unshielded parking-lot lights. But yard lights and bright gas-station canopies continued to multiply, and a great deal of wasteful lighting was grandfathered in under the 1988 law.

"In spite of our good lighting code, we have a thousand points of light pollution," says John Grahame of the Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition.

In 1999, three men founded the coalition. One was Diskan. One was Grahame, an activist who had been working to preserve local open space, including the nearby Dry Lake wetland (HCN, 5/8/00: Crater doesn't come cheap). The third was Chris Luginbuhl, an astronomer at Flagstaff's U.S. Naval Observatory and a primary force behind the 1988 ordinances.

The three have been able to rally considerable support behind their notion that good lighting is important for more than just astronomers.

"Good lighting is good for everybody," Luginbuhl says. "In the grand scheme, whether an astronomer can continue a research project is much less important than whether a child can see the stars."

Education meets business

Though the coalition has been involved in some vehement development controversies over the years, as dark-sky activists they chose collaboration over confrontation. Early in their campaign, they presented a "Friend of the Stars" award to the owners of a local Texaco station with shielded lighting.

With the help of a $3,000 grant from the Flagstaff Community Foundation, they created an education campaign that produced brochures for home-owners, posters for stores that sell lights, and activity packets for local schools.

The coalition has also formed an alliance with the chamber of commerce and with Arizona Public Service, the local electric utility. APS and the city pledged $11,000 for the "Million Lumens Campaign," which aims to modify a million lumens of lighting by year's end.

Businesses will use the money to replace outdated, wasteful lights or buy new equipment. "The changes can improve light quality and can result in some pretty nice energy savings," says APS's Brad Ryan. "We recognize that quality lighting is important to the community."

Excessive lighting is often installed by business owners concerned about security, but dark-skies advocates say that glaring lighting doesn't provide safety. "The bad guys need to see, too," Luginbuhl points out. As if to confirm the point, the coalition gave one of its year 2000 "Friend of the Stars" awards to the city and county for exceptional, glare-free lighting design at a new jail.

Flagstaff isn't the only Western city tackling the problem of light pollution. Tucson, which like Flagstaff is ringed by observatories, has had a fairly strict lighting code for years. Weber County, Utah, adopted that state's first dark-sky ordinance in 2000. Redmond, Wash., passed an improved lighting code last summer.

Ketchum, Idaho, passed a highly progressive lighting ordinance two years ago and has just finished retrofitting all its streetlights, at a total cost of $4,100, to prevent glare. Like the other ordinances, Ketchum's requires shielding of lights, not turning them off.

But the Flagstaff activists stand out for their innovative coalition building. "Flagstaff has obviously made a special commitment," says Liz Alvarez, associate director of the International Dark Sky Association. "The city really shows some investment in energy savings, in safety, and in future appreciation of the night sky."

On Oct. 24, the International Dark-Sky Association formally designated Flagstaff as the first "International Dark-Sky City."

The activists hope their influence will be felt beyond Flagstaff. If light pollution is widespread, then perhaps its solution can be, too, they say. As Diskan says, "This can happen everywhere. It can be done in communities around the country. It's a great community builder."

Freelancer Peter Friederici writes in Flagstaff and tries to remember the names of constellations.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityCommunitiesArticleLawns and pools close in on desert labhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/100/3106
The University of Arizona's Desert Laboratory, a unique
desert biological field station, faces the pressure of the city of
Tucson's growth and the uncertain future of the land.Tumamoc Hill, Ariz. - When the Carnegie Institution established its desert laboratory on this stony, black basalt hill 94 years ago, some 12,000 residents lived in the small town of Tucson two miles to the east. Today Tucson has grown to almost half a million people, and Sunbelt sprawl threatens the future of one of the nation's oldest continuously operated biological field stations.

The Desert Laboratory, operated by the University of Arizona, encompasses 869 acres of Sonoran desert scrub that has remained relatively pristine since livestock grazing was halted in 1907. The surrounding area is awash in new housing and resort development.

The university owns part of Tumamoc Hill, including the laboratory's historic stone buildings. But 320 acres of the total are owned by the Arizona State Land Department.

The land department is currently considering whether to renew the permit that allows the university to use 320 acres of state trust land as part of the laboratory, raising fears that the state might opt to sell the land to deep-pocketed developers. If that happens, the laboratory would lose some of its long-term monitoring plots, where slow-paced changes in vegetation have been watched for nearly a century.

"It wouldn't shut down the research projects here, but it would mutilate them," says Paul Martin, a geosciences researcher who has been stationed at the laboratory since 1957. "We have time on our side here. After collecting almost 100 years of data you can really start cashing in on how the desert works."

Early laboratory researchers were meticulous in counting and mapping plants on the site. By looking at their data, botanists in recent decades have been able to document the spread of non-native species - more than 50 at last count - as well as ups and downs in the populations of saguaros, creosote bushes and other desert perennials. They have learned volumes not only about how individual plant species adapt to the desert, but how species interact.

"All of the research conducted here revolves around the changes that happen over time," says Raymond Turner, a Desert Laboratory botanist who has devoted much of his career to monitoring long-term vegetation changes in the Southwest. "Some of the vegetation plots here were first mapped in 1906. They are the oldest plots in the world on which individual plants have been censused."

They are also very cheap plots. The university currently pays the state land department a bargain fee of $4,199 a year to use the land. The land department, which is charged with making a maximum profit on its land to support public schools, could make a lot more money than that if it sold to a developer. Construction of new homes and resort facilities around Tumamoc Hill has raised estimates of the value of those 320 acres to as high as several million dollars, according to state officials.

Charles Geoffrion, associate vice president for research at the University of Arizona, says the university, which has faced significant budget cuts in recent years, probably can't afford the land if the state puts it up for sale.

But, the rapidly escalating land values around Tumamoc Hill, ironically, may buy its defenders some time. Dennis Cady of the state land department says that even if approached by a developer, the department might decide not to sell the land now.

"We look at when the best time is to sell the land, when revenues will be highest," he says. "That may not be until more development has occurred in the area."

In the meantime, some land department officials have begun exploring other ways to preserve the laboratory. Last year, state legislators passed a law that allows the department to designate state land near towns and cities for conservation. The land would still be auctioned or leased to the highest bidder, but with the stipulation that it remain undeveloped.

Last fall, the university submitted a formal proposal asking that the department dedicate the land for conservation. Officials say the land department will likely decide on the university's application by late spring, after a public comment period. If its request is approved, the university will have from three to eight years to raise money to buy the land at market value. Anticipating such a possibility, the Pima County Board of Supervisors is considering a bond package - which voters would decide in May - that would include funds for that purpose.

Voters may not be thrilled about that. But at a time when urban sprawl confronts residents throughout the Tucson area, there will likely be considerable support for preserving Tumamoc Hill as open space, as a research facility, and as a hitherto underappreciated local landmark.

"We're getting the pulse of the desert here," says the laboratory's Paul Martin. "In the future, if all goes well here, Tucson will be known as a community with unusual access to how the desert works."

The Arizona State Land Department will hold a public hearing in Tucson on the university's application at 1:30 p.m. on April 3, at 400 W. Congress, room 5.]]>No publisherDeserts1997/03/03 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleAbout those buff bird-watchershttp://www.hcn.org/issues/57/1787

While it was certainly
entertaining to read that "naturalists' go to the park to nap in
the nude (Heard around the West, March 18) - and perhaps quite true
- I can't help but suspect that you meant "naturists' instead. What
characterizes most of the naturalists I know is not so much an
interest in being in the nude themselves as wanting to see the
birds and the bees and the rest of nature in the
buff.

Peter
Friederici

Tucson,
Arizona

]]>No publisherLetter to the editorArticleGrand Central Canyonhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/83/2580
The National Park Service weighs the benefits of four
management plans limiting numbers within Grand Canyon National
Park.No publisherRecreationEssaysArticle